mm. 



Printed- for' 



ff J^e y\ut^o£ 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 
Til lil " 

Chap. Copyright No. 

Shelf.___^S-5 <f 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



445?0 



|:Ubr*uf y of Congress 

Two Copies Received 
SEP 7 J900 

Copyright tntry 

SECOND COPY. 

Dfcliverixl to 

ORDtH DIVISION, 

-SPL_LLL1900_ 



•554- 



Copyright A* D, \ 900, by W. E. Simonds. 



^O^S 



PRINTED BY CLARK & SMITH, 
HARTFORD, CONN. 



WHITHER? 



"HHE boon most earnestly desired by the 
average human heart is immortality — 
the assurance of it* More thousands of books 
have been written about it than about any 
other thing* If a man finds that he does 
not desire immortality he may know that 
therein he differs from the average and nor- 
mal man* A threatened future of long con- 
tinued punishment is less unwelcome than 
the prospect of annihilation* Hope whispers 
the possibility of relief from suffering in 
some remote age* Hope dies when it faces 
oblivion* Whenever we turn to that which 
comes after the change which men call 
death* the aspiration rises* even though 
silently* for one sure word from the silence 
whence we come and to which we return* 



These pages discuss this question of im- 
mortality* They do not deal with any 
theological doctrine as such* They do not 
seek to differ with the tenets of any relig- 
ious belief* The propositions of these pages 
proceed on the basis of facts which are open 



Whither 

to perception by all men, other facts which 
may, if men will, be held by them as matters 
of positive knowledge and conclusions which 
are intended to be the results of reasoning 
which rejects that which is odd or fantastic 
and which progresses from one step to another 
in plain and direct fashion* This reasoning 
has occasion at times to make use of certain 
truths which agree with the intuitions of all 
men and with universal experience, such as : 
there can be no effect without an adequate and 
equal cause; sometihng cannot proceed from 
nothing; something cannot be rescrvled into 
nothing ; no part of force or substance can be 
destroyed* Simple and axiomatic as these 
truths seem, they are nevertheless at times 
anchors taking hold of the deeps of sure 
steadfastness amid shifting sands and cur- 
rents that seemingly move one knows not 
whither* 

The generally recognized facts which bear 
upon the problem of existence — where we 
came from, what we are, and whither we 
go — are not many when one first begins to 
look for them* Beginning with himself, and 
that naturally, man feels sufficiently sure 
that, for the present at least, he is a fact* 
That he is himself, distinct and apart from 
all other things, living or dead, he needs no 
proof aside from his own consciousness, a 
thing that includes surety both in thought 



Whither 

and feeling of individual, intelligent exist- 
ence* Looking around him, man finds himself 
living with hundreds of millions of fellow 
facts of individual consciousness on a globe 
seemingly designed in some fair measure for 
just that purpose* He finds that the solar 
system, which includes the earth on which 
he lives, is only one — a very small one in 
comparison — of an innumerable company 
distributed throughout regions of space so 
vast that he cannot comprehend the first 
thing of its immensity* And there he is, all 
at once, face to face with the mystery of it* 
And he cannot help wondering u What is it 
all for?" He knows well enough that this 
latter question runs on all fours with the 
question of his own immortality* 

The aids which man has in working, by 
himself, at the solution of these questions 
are his capacity to observe and remember, 
his capacity for reason — including certain 
axiomatic truths but lately stated — and his 
grasp of certain facts of high importance by 
means of positive knowledge* He needs 
no commentary on his capacity to observe 
and remember ; he understands well enough 
about that ; he uses it every day* He knows, 
in a practical way, very well what his reason 
is — that co-operating union of his mental 
faculties by the aid of which he examines, 
combines, compares and draws principles of 



Whither 

general application from the impressions 
which his senses bring and the imagined 
things which spring within him* The facts 
of positive knowledge are those of which a 
man is sure independently of having learned 
or having reasoned about them* A man's 
consciousness* his surety of his identity* his 
individual existence* is one of these facts of 
positive knowledge* 

Observation and reason are not our only 
sources of knowledge* Man holds some facts 
as matters of positive knowledge* The 
human mind is capable of knowing and 
does know facts which are beyond the grasp 
of the senses* which the mind cannot prove 
and which it cannot even comprehend* For 
instance infinite space — space without limit 
in any direction — is something incapable of 
proof (as one may prove that two and two 
make four or that water and salt will coal- 
esce in solution) but a slight degree of 
attention rightly directed will show anyone 
that he knows that space exists forever in 
all directions* Stand out under the sky* 
Point your finger toward the blue vault in 
any direction* Imagine a line projected in 
that direction so far that a ray of light* 
moving nearly two hundred thousand miles 
a second* must travel a million years to 
reach the end of the imaginary line; you 
know* absolutely know* that unmeasured 

4 



Whither 

space goes beyond that point. Multiply the 
length of the line a million times; again 
you know as before that unmeasured space 
goes beyond this point* Multiply the length 
of the line until the mind wearies with the 
effort — the weariness only demonstrating 
the mind's incapacity to comprehend infinity 
— and still you know that unmeasured space 
goes on beyond the farthest point to which 
the mind can project its imaginary line ; and 
you know, absolutely know, that in your 
effort to imagine distance, you have not 
progressed in the slightest degree in ap- 
proaching the point where space stops* The 
tremendous fact is outside of all your physi- 
cal senses* You cannot prove it* You can- 
not comprehend it* You simply know it* 
That is positive knowledge* 

So it is with time past, although that is 
for some persons a little more difficult to 
deal with at first because many have always 
unconsciously dated time as beginning with 
the creation of the world* But imagine a 
date when the world was created, no matter 
whether you place it six thousand years ago 
or six thousand million* Dwell on that 
point of time for a little; the knowledge 
comes home to you insistently that time had 
been going on before that event just as it 
has since* Put back your imaginary date 
as far as you will, and the knowledge comes 



Whither 

home to you, again and again, and with 
each repeated effort, that you ate never any 
neater the beginning of time* In other words 
it is impossible for time to have ever had a 
beginning* It has been running forever* 
Physical perception, proof and comprehen- 
sion of this fact are all out of the question* 
But you know that it is so. 

It is easier to deal with time to come* 
One knows and feels without effort that 
time can never cease to run* Time and 
eternity are one and the same thing ; they 
possibly differ that in this world we have 
definite natural time-units, the period of 
light and darkness which make up a day, 
and the round of seasons which constitute 
a year, while there is little reason to think 
that the next world, if any there be, has 
any time-unit* Its inhabitants, if any there 
be, apparently can have no concern with the 
flight of time, no occasion to note its pass- 
age* It may well be that u there is no night 
there*" 

The eternal duration of substance — that 
which has objective existence and extension 
— in the past is another fact of which you 
are sure; for no one needs to be told that 
something cannot be produced from nothing* 
And yet, if you really try to form a mental 
image of this eternal duration of substance 



Whither 

in the past you can no more do it than you 
can form a like image of the endless time 
behind you* 

The endless existence of force — that 
which has potency of change — in the past 
is another fact of which you are sure* You 
would not give a sober second's heed to him 
who should assert to you that at one time 
in the past the universe was dead and force- 
less and that at some subsequent instant, 
force sprang into being with absolutely no 
cause whatever* And this eternity of the 
past duration of force necessarily applies to 
each and every kind of force which exists to- 
day* that is* there was necessarily always 
in the past a force either identical with or 
adequate to produce each and every possible 
force of the present and of the future* But 
you will fail in any attempt to form a men- 
tal image of this eternal existence of force 
of any kind in the past* 

The continuity of life through a past 
eternity is another incomprehensible fact* 
the surety of which comes to you partly 
through absolute knowledge and partly 
through right reason* Imagine a time when 
life nowhere existed and you at once know 
that neither out of dead space nor out of a 
dead universe could life have ever risen* 
There never could have been a time when 



Whither 

life was not* To produce life from death is 
to produce an effect without a cause* It is 
to produce something from nothing and you 
know that something cannot be produced 
from nothing* Reason applies this surety 
to life as a present fact and thereby demon- 
strates its eternal existence in the past* 

Here then we have certain infinities that 
we are sure of* space* time* substance* force 
and life* We cannot comprehend them, we 
cannot form a mental image of one of them* 
But our lack of comprehension does not dis- 
turb our surety of their existence* One les- 
son of it is that we are not to be troubled 
about the existence of other things to which 
facts or right reason point simply because 
we cannot comprehend them. 

In studying the problem of existence one 
needs to effectually subdue and overcome 
the doubts and questionings which are apt 
to arise in the mind as to the reality and 
actual existence of forces which are beyond 
the grasp of senses* forces which cannot be 
seen* heard* touched* tasted or smelled* In 
considering that matter those very senses 
may properly have attention to begin with* 
If anyone knows will he tell ho<zv — by what 
force and by what action of that force — it is 
that certain nerves receive sense impressions* 
that certain nerves transmit those impressions 



Whither 

to the bt ain, and that the brain translates 
such impressions into terms understood by 
something* within us* The nerves and the 
brain we can find if we take the man apart 
but we cannot find the forces which operate 
through them and we certainly cannot find 
the consciousness* Some force, with mind 
behind it, attends upon your heart-beats and 
your respiration without your attention or 
supervision and sleeps not when you sleep ; 
you will look in vain to find it* "When you 
eat substance which through heat has been 
deprived of all semblance and potency of 
life, in the ordinary sense of that word, 
some subtle alchemic force distills from it 
the different sorts of nutrition for the whole 
multitude of the organs, tissues and fluids 
of the body; and, more wonderful still, 
feeds from it the very force that works all 
these wonders ; you will look for that al- 
chemic force in vain* Four hundred thou- 
sand million of waves of the light-ether 
enter your eye each second when you see 
the color red; and an average atom vi- 
brates five hundred millions of millions a 
second; the imagination cannot picture 
these things, much less the senses grasp 
them* The entire vegetable world from the 
blade of grass to the mighty Mariposa red- 
woods, trillions upon trillions in number, 
all with wonderful and wonder-working 
mechanisms within them, are maintained 



Whither 

and nourished by forces elusive of all our 
senses; their aggregate effect is so great 
that if their activity could be heard it would 
drown the roar of Niagara; the energy 
their green leaves noiselessly exert in tear- 
ing apart the carbonic acid of the air, ap- 
propriating its carbon and freeing its oxygen, 
easily puts to shame all the steam engines 
in the world* A force from the sun leaps 
to us a hundred and eighty-six thousand 
miles a second along almost a hundred 
millions of miles of darkest night, giving no 
human sign of its flight till it strikes our 
atmosphere when it bursts into a radiance 
which is at once light and heat for the 
whole world; and one thing it does is to 
noiselessly and invisibly lift millions of tons 
of water each day from the earth to the 
clouds; without that force there would be 
neither brook nor river to run to the sea* 
Another mighty but elusive force spins the 
earth like a top a thousand miles an hour 
at the surface; some fellow force, similarly 
elusive, hurls the earth along its orbital path 
eighteen miles and a half every second ; and 
still a third moves the whole solar system 
twelve or more miles a second toward the 
bright star Lyra* These are but a few, the 
merest beginning of the unseen forces which 
are the real masters of the universe* The 
senses grasp nothing but effects* The causes* 
every one of them, are non-existent to all 

10 



Whithet 

our senses* The existence of a force is not 
to be doubted simply because we cannot 
sense it* There may be reasons for doubt- 
ing the existence of a suggested force but 
its non-existence to the senses is not one of 
them* 



In dealing with the problem of existence, 
one also needs to effectually overcome all 
doubt as to the possibility of the existence 
of substances which no sense of man can 
grasp* And it will help greatly in dealing 
with that problem to realize that such sub- 
stances are vastly more enduring than the 
forms of matter which are subject to appre- 
hension by the senses* We can no more 
form a mental image of the possible rarity 
of substance than we can form a mental 
image of the distance of far away stars* 
The etheric substance in and by which light 
is propagated and transmitted is so rare that 
it passes through a pane of glass — a sub- 
stance as dense as steel — as though it were 
an open door* With a microscope of high 
power one may see objects i - 100*000 of an 
inch in diameter but that does not come 
within a long distance of the possibility of 
seeing an atom* Different men have at- 
tempted to calculate* in different ways* the 
number of atoms in a permanent gas at 
zero temperature and ordinary atmospheric 
pressure* Thompson makes it 98,320,000.- 

11 



Whither 

000,000 in I - 1,000,000,000 of a cubic inch; 
Clerk Maxwell makes it 311,000,000,000; 
Stoney 1,901,000,000,000; and Sorby 6,000, 
000,000,000* Sorby suggests that even if 
we could improve the microscope so that 
atoms would come within its capacity, light 
is too coarse a medium to enable us to see 
them* A well known physicist says it 
would take a group of a hundred and 
twenty-five million atoms to come within 
the grasp of a microscope of the highest 
power* Such figures convey no real mean- 
ing whatever to our minds; we can form 
no mental image of such minuteness* Mean- 
while, however, the atom must be far more 
of an unchanging reality than is the Wash- 
ington monument* The light-ether is rarity 
itself as compared with the atom* But it is 
easily conceivable that substance may exist 
which compares with the light-ether in 
rarity as that compares with lead* And 
probably matter is only substance in a cer- 
tain degree of density and in atomic form* 

Notwithstanding the fact that, in some 
sense, force is the master and substance is the 
servant, it is plainly evident that force can- 
not act or exist apart from substance* As 
well might a lever lift in the absence of a 
fulcrum or a sword cut without an arm to 
wield it* Everything which exists, create 
or uncreate, is and must be either substance 

12 



Whither 

or an attribute inseparable from substance* 
The old theologians saw that truth when 
they made the Nicene creed state that Christ 
44 is of one substance with the Father/' 
Isaac Newton arrived at the inseparable- 
ness of force from substance through reason, 
and since his time men have demonstrated 
it by investigation and experiment* Heat, 
light, sound, gravitation, electricity, mag- 
netism, life and all other forces whatsoever, 
can only act in and through substance* 
Observation and reason teach that in the 
last analysis, substance and force are insep- 
arable and indivisible; whether at that 
point they be one thing or two inseparable 
things need not now be discussed* A subtle 
substance named the "ether," a substance 
of greater rarity than matter, is the medium 
through and in which many of the invisi- 
ble forces act, the force being propagated by 
wave-motions of the ether* One of the 
simplest of all happenings involves an ex- 
traordinary instance of this action* When 
an apple falls it is moved by the force called 
gravitation ; that is a force that involves a 
velocity in the ether more than a million 
times in excess that of light, which moves 
one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles 
a second* A knowledge of an ether and of 
the inability of all force to act except through 
substance, offers a reasonable explanation 
of different sorts of communication, out of 

13 



Whither 

the ordinary, from one person to another* 
Mind reading, the transmission of thought 
from one person to another with no sensible 
intermediary, is one of these, the reasonable 
explanation being* that thought sets up 
mind-waves in an ether which flows in all 
directions and which, in the case of some 
recipients, are felt by some inward faculty 
and translated into terms understood by the 
recipient* In hypnotism, the governing of 
the actions, thoughts and feelings of one 
person by the will of another, the control- 
ling impulse from the directing will must 
be communicated through the medium of 
an ether* In mind-cure, so called, an ether 
is the only medium through which the 
healing impulse can proceed from the healer 
to the patient* In wireless telegraphy the 
communicating impulse consists of motions 
in an ether* It is probably one ether sub- 
ject to different sorts of wave motion for 
these different purposes* Ether is not ma- 
terial ; it is not matter ; comets millions of 
miles in extent but so tenuous in substance 
that the smallest stars shine through them, 
dash about the sun at a tremendous pace, 
almost four hundred miles a second, and 
suffer no perceptible retardation by ether, 
showing it to be a frictionless medium or at 
any rate so nearly such that it is necessarily 
below matter in rarity* 



14 



Whither 

Substance pervades every spot and point 
in the universe* The light of a hundred 
million suns comes to us from depths of 
space so remote that any combination of 
figures which we put together to represent 
their distances conveys no more real mean- 
ing to our minds than does a page of San- 
scrit to an Australian Bushman, but if you 
were able to put in the path of that light a 
zone of pure emptiness the millionth part 
of an inch across it, that messenger of in- 
conceivably swift wing would die at that 
bar on the instant* The wave motion which 
propagates light could not cross the bar* 
Force can be transmitted only through 
substance and only by continuously com- 
municated vibrations or wave-motions of 
substance* Substance is necessarily every- 
where* While we can in no wise compre- 
hend the infinity of the space that surrounds 
us on all sides and in every direction, we 
can form some image of things contained 
therein which are large to the contemplation 
of a human being* On a clear night if one 
has good eyes he can see about two thou- 
sand stars; with the possible exception of 
two or three planets of our own solar system, 
they are all suns* Our sun is ninety-three 
millions of miles away from us and the 
nearest of these star -suns multiplies that 
distance two hundred and seventy-five thou- 
sand times* With a good field glass one 

15 



Whither 

may see about two hundred thousand of 
these star-suns and with the Lick or Yerkes 
telescopes a hundred millions come into sight* 
If all these star-suns — fifty thousand for 
each one we now see — were visible to the 
eye, the sky, upon a clear night, would be 
an unbroken fret work of golden star-fire* 
And who shall say how many there are of 
dead suns with their systems of dead planets, 
invisible in the black night of interstellar 
space, waiting for the morning of creation 
to break again for them ? Some of these 
star-suns are so far away that their light, 
traveling a hundred and eighty-six thou- 
sand miles a second, must be a hundred 
thousand years in reaching us* Substance 
exists all the way without a rift or the star 
light would never reach us* This is only 
the beginning of infinity* Substance per- 
vades it all* Substance is of infinite extent* 
However, one need not jump to the con- 
clusion that the entirety of the system which 
includes the visible universe is the only 
system of that general kind in existence, 
for there is a star in the sky sometimes 
called u The Runaway," moving some two 
hundred miles and more a second, whose 
motions are not given or controlled by any 
or all the heavenly bodies known to us* 
This curious stranger evidently invites us 
to contemplate the possibility of the exist- 
ence of other systems more or less like that 
system of which the visible universe is a part* 

16 



Whither 

What do we really know about the atomic 
constitution of matter and about the exist- 
ence and properties of ether? An atom is 
the unit of matter* It is both the physical 
and chemical unit* There are some eighty 
known sorts of matter* as gold* silver* iron* 
carbon, oxygen* hydrogen* ete* Each sort 
is called an "element" That matter has 
units* indivisible units* is clear from the fact 
that these different elements* when they 
combine at all (and they do combine in 
variety) ♦ always combine in definite and 
unchangeable proportions by weight* If 
matter were not composed of units, if it were 
infinitely divisible* there could be no such 
law of combination in definite proportions 
and the elements would combine in any 
proportions as — to illustrate roughly — we 
may mix together any proportions of two 
liquids* It is a law which enabled a Russian 
chemist. Mendeleef* to construct a table 
of elements disposed according to atomic 
weights and properties* with certain unfilled 
gaps* from which he predicted the future 
discovery of then unknown elements* hav- 
ing properties which he described ; and since 
then the discovery of new elements has 
accurately fulfilled the prediction as to some 
of the gaps* How large are these units of 
matter* these atoms? A microscope of the 
highest power enables us to see things which 
are only I -100.000 of an inch in diameter 

17 



Whither 

but it gives no sign of capacity to discern 
an atom* An eighth of a grain of indigo, 
dissolved in sulphuric acid, will give a dis- 
tinctly blue color to ten quarts of water, the 
millionth part of a grain to a drop, but that 
does not get near to the minuteness of an 
atom. We get nearer when we separate 
water, as we readily can, into oxygen and 
hydrogen, the latter being the gas which is 
used to fill balloons, and having atoms so 
small and light that in common air it rushes 
upward like a cork in water* Physicists 
agree that they have measured the magni- 
tude of atoms in several different ways but 
no explanation of these ways is likely to be 
understood, they tell us, without "a pretty 
thorough knowledge of molecular physics." 
One method involves a study of the colors 
displayed by a soap-bubble, which are due 
to the interference with each other of the 
light-waves that fall on the film, the length 
of which the physicists readily measure; it 
results that the thickness of that part of the 
film which is black for a second or two 
before it breaks is shown to be 1-10,000,000 
(J -9,600,000) of an inch. This is not a 
thickness made up of a single stratum of 
atoms; it is a thickness of water, the ulti- 
mate particles of which, as water, are mole- 
cules, each composed of two atoms of hydro- 
gen and one atom of oxygen chemically 
combined; and there must be more than 

18 



Whither 

one stratum of molecules (each containing 
its three atoms) in this thickness of water- 
film for a single stratum could not maintain 
itself in the air, as a film, for an instant, 
wherefore a single atom can only have a 
fractional part of the 1-10,000,000 of an inch 
for its individual magnitude* One well 
known physicist speaks of that magnitude 
of the individual atom as being 1-50,000- 
000 of an inch, in which case it would re- 
quire a group of 125,000,000 (the cube of 
500 atoms in a line) to be visible as a mere 
point in a microscope of the highest power, 
one that discerns a thing that is 1-100,000 
of an inch in diameter. But it is not read- 
ily to be seen why the single atom must not 
be much smaller than 1-50,000,000 of an 
inch; when we allow for plural strata of 
molecules and room for the vibration of the 
three atoms of each — all within the thick- 
ness of the water-film — the magnitude of 
the single atom would seem to be less than 
1-100,000,000 of an inch* It is not a neces- 
sity of the discussion of these pages that we 
should know just how large an atom is* It 
is sufficient on that point that it is a reality 
and minute beyond our comprehension ; and 
that much we know* How do we know 
that the atom vibrates at a tremendous rate? 
It is known that the ether has various sorts 
of wave motions, for instance those associ- 
ated with light, electricity and gravitation, 

19 



Whither 

the last named necessarily constant and 
never ceasing* It is known that these wave- 
motions do not originate in the ether but 
are imparted to it by the vibration of atoms 
of matter* Speaking of atomic vibration of 
a thousand million of millions per second* a 
well known physicist says* u there is indub- 
itable evidence that the atoms of matter do 
actually make such a number of vibrations 
per second*" Consider the wave-motions of 
light for a little: the velocity of light is 
186*000 miles a second; " the wave-lengths 
of light in the ether are known with great 
precision/' they being 1-40*000 or 1-50*000 
of an inch; the velocity divided by the 
wave-length gives the number of vibrations 
of the atom, imparting the wave-motion to 
the ether, nearly six hundred millions of 
millions per second* The atomic vibration 
involved in the stress called gravity* which 
is necessarily constant and unceasing* is at 
a much higher rate than that involved in 
light ; it is at least one hundred and eighty- 
six thousand millions per second* How do 
we know the ether exists as a thing apart 
from matter? The working of wireless 
telegraphy depends on the existence of such 
ether* The transmission of electric energy 
depends on the existence of such ether* The 
working of gravitation depends on the ex- 
istence of such an ether* The transmission 
of the Roentgen ray depends on the exist- 

20 



Whither 

ence of such an ether ♦ Let us again con- 
sider light for a little* That light is not 
substance but a mode of motion in substance 
is shown by dividing a beam of light and 
letting the two parts travel by different 
paths to a screen ; either part, alone, illum- 
inates the screen but wherever the two parts 
of the beam interfere at the point of union, 
there the screen is darkened, the two parts 
mutually destroying each other; if light 
were substance the reunion of the two parts 
would but add to the illumination; their 
destruction of each other proves that light 
is not substance but a mode of motion in 
substance* That substance is the ether* It 
is substance beyond matter in rarity* Glass 
is matter, matter as dense as steel but it 
offers little hindrance to the passage of light; 
when we see the light pass through the 
glass we know that the ether in which the 
light is propagated necessarily flows through 
the glass with what is practically perfect 
freedom* The Roentgen ray tells the same 
sort of tale about many sorts of matter that 
are opaque to light* As ether is substance 
why is it not also matter — a finer sort of 
matter? We have just seen that matter 
has indivisible units, atoms ; and ether has 
no atoms ; the ether is continuous and mat- 
ter is discontinuous ; atoms have vibrations 
but the motions in ether are wave-motions* 
Matter has gravity ; every particle of mat- 

21 



Whither 

ter in the universe attracts every other par- 
ticle; this is true of atoms and is equally 
true of the huge, far-away suns in the vast 
night of space* Ether is gravitationless ; if it 
were not it would accumulate around the 
suns and planets, refracting and retarding 
light and leaving inter-spaces which the 
light could not cross* Matter has friction 
while the ether is f rictionless ; if it were not 
frictionless it would retard the movements 
of all the heavenly bodies without exception 
especially the comets of extremely tenuous 
body ; but it does not retard them* There 
are many differences between matter and 
ether but these suffice* Why ether ? Why 
not ethers — in the plural? Perhaps there 
are ; there may be a special ether for word- 
less communication between God and man, 
between spiritual beings and mortals, and 
between man and man* And then again 
one ether may suffice* The work of Far- 
aday and Maxwell made it reasonably 
certain "that the waves which constitute 
light and waves produced by changing mag- 
netism were identical in their nature, were 
in the same medium, traveled with the same 
velocity, were capable of refraction, and so 
on*" Atoms are probably vortex rings of 
ether in ether ; we do not know how they 
could be produced but their production being 
granted the actions and properties of the 
atoms stand accounted for* Even so, matter 

22 



Whither 

and ether differ widely* If one ventures a 
glance into a pot of melted steel he is driven 
back by a blinding glare of light and heat* 
Nevertheless the ether intimately pervades 
the white-hot metal at a temperature of 
absolute zero, a degree of cold which the 
imagination cannot compass* 

Human consciousness and mentality gen- 
erally are not attributes of matter — by which 
is meant substance in atomic form, sub- 
stance that has gravity* Quite the contrary* 
Neither is ever associated with matter ex- 
cept in company with life-force which will 
only occupy organized matter* To be sure 
structureless protoplasm is life-stuff but it 
cannot build blood, bone, fibre or tissue 
except in the presence of an organism pos- 
sessing the full life principle* When the 
human life-force quits matter, consciousness 
and mentality in its entirety both go with 
it* The query not rarely put forth as to 
whether thought is not really a product of 
the action of the gray matter of the brain, 
might busy itself profitably awhile with the 
question whether the power afforded by a 
steam engine in action is essentially a pro- 
duct of the steel and iron or of the steam* 
And the kindred query as to how it is that 
an injury to the brain interferes with mental 
action might with equal profit, ask how it 
is that the steam is powerless for the pur- 

23 



Whither 

pose in hand, when the engine is broken or 
disordered. Force cannot act except through 
substance. Conscious mentality cannot ex- 
press itself — at least under human conditions 
— except through organized substance and 
when the organism is out of tune, in those 
respects which concern its relation to mental 
action, the expression of mental action suf- 
fers like discord. We do not know and 
cannot conceive of human consciousness or 
of any feature of conscious mentality except 
in connection and company with life-force. 
This fixity of association points to the con- 
clusion that consciousness and mentality in 
general have necessary eternity and existence 
along with life. If the fact be so, that is 
immortality — conscious immortality. 

Brain action is an accompaniment of all 
thinking but it is an instrument of the 
mental process and not its source or cause. 
The memory is a mental faculty that effec- 
tively mocks all effort to establish mentality 
as a product of brain action. The entire 
human body is constantly perishing and as 
constantly renewed; the old physiologies 
gave us a new body in each term of seven 
years' the probabilities point to entire re- 
newa in a shorter time than that. More- 
over the destruction of brain cells takes place 
in all thinking and feeling; in deep thought 
and strong feeling the destruction goes on 

24 



Whither 

rapidly. The renewal of the brain takes 
place in a much shorter time than that of 
the body as a whole* Remembering: the 
past is a mental act of the highest import- 
ance* Mental growth and improvement 
would be impossible if the mind could retain 
nothing of its experience* The brain cells 
which act in all such experience perish in 
the acting ; if memory depended upon them 
it would perish too* But memory does not 
perish; it persists; and it is not rare that in 
years past middle life the happenings of 
childhood and youth are recalled more clear- 
ly than events of intervening years. The 
brain perishes but the memory persists* This 
is a fact that establishes mentality as regnant 
over brain action and not at all its product. 

Will the life principle of human beings of 
necessity persist to all eternity? That is a 
question of mighty import* On the one 
hand we have an eternity of life in the 
past* pointing by analogy to an eternity of 
life in the future* On the other hand we 
have the torment of knowing that we see 
every living thing die first or last* Wait a 
moment. What is it we do see ? We see 
at one moment organized matter presenting 
appearances that tell us that life is in it and 
we see that same organization at another 
moment presenting appearances which tell 
us that life is not in it* We have never yet 

25 



Whither 

seen, heard, touched, tasted or smelled any 
force of any kind whatsoever* We have 
seen an apple fall but no sense ever yet 
perceived the force — we call it gravity for 
the sake of giving it a name— which moved 
it. We have seen the armature fly to the 
magnet but no sense ever yet apprehended 
magnetism* We have seen a million things 
but we never yet saw light* And so on 
through the whole category. Substance 
when sufficiently dense we can touch, taste, 
see, hear and smell* Matter, the servant 
and slave, is in evidence to all our senses, 
but the forces which, by lawful process, do 
what they will with matter are always 
out of the grasp and contact of every sense* 
Life— whatever else of high degree it may 
be— is a force- No part of force or substance 
can possibly be destroyed; that is axiomatic* 
Some, perhaps all, of the physical forces are 
convertible each into the other* Power, 
through a dynamo, readily changes into 
electric energy and that again, through 
proper media, into heat or light or back into 
power again. Not so the life-force* Man 
struggles in vain to get life except from life* 
If life were convertible into the other forces 
it would be because of its subjection to their 
law as to convertibility; and other forces 
would be convertible into life* But they are 
not* So far as human knowledge goes, life 
is not convertible into or from any other 

26 



Whither 

force. So far as human knowledge goes, life 
is inconvertible and changeless* An eternity 
of life behind us warrants an expectation of 
eternity of life in the future. All this comes 
so near to being proof of the necessary 
eternity of future life, that if there were as 
much evidence for the opposite we might 
well be and should be hopeless. 

It would argue nothing pro or con, on 
the question of immortality, if man should 
succeed in coaxing a manifestation of life 
from matter for it is instinct with incon- 
ceivable activity — as a mere reference to its 
atoms vibrating millions of times a second 
sufficiently indicates — and is also instinct 
with wonderful energy — as a mere reference 
to the mixing of the harmless elements 
which produce nitro-glycerine again suf- 
ficiently indicates. The same life-fount 
which is at the root of the human life-force 
must be at the root of the activity and 
energy of matter, wherefore, possibly, we 
might produce life from matter if we only 
knew how. But it would not in the slightest 
degree tend to the conclusion that life is 
inherent in matter apart from a power and 
source behind it. However, so far as we 
can see, it is ordered that we shall not pro- 
duce vegetable or animal life from matter 
not already containing it. Artificial pro- 
duction of protoplasm would be something 
far short of that* 

27 



Whither 

It is natural to query where the life- 
principle of the human being* goes when it 
quits the organized matter of the human 
body which it has energized* That life is a 
force is certain* Force cannot exist apart 
from substance — not for an instant* Life 
cannot be destroyed* It is not an entity. 
It cannot fly off into space in company with 
nothing* When life quits matter it must 
quit in company with substance* That is 
necessarily live substance; and live substance 
is necessarily an organization* This con- 
clusively calls for the existence* in intimate 
relations with the human body of matter* of 
another organic body of subtle substance 
which may well be called the "spiritual 
body," which is energized by the same life- 
force that energizes the body of matter* and 
which* with the life-force* quits the body of 
matter when it is no longer tenantable by 
the life-force* 

The realization of the possibility of a 
thing one has never seen* as well as the 
formation of a mental picture of it* are 
naturally helped by knowledge of an anal- 
ogous thing* Many have seen and all may 
see a human skeleton* That which the eye 
rests on* bone material* is inorganic matter 
and was essentially such when the skeleton 
was the supporting framev/ork of a living 
human body* It nevertheless contained with- 

28 



Whither 

in it another skeleton of organic matter, of 
the same size and form which can readily be 
brought to light and view* Lay the skele- 
ton in a bath of hydrochloric acid, renewed 
from time to time, and the calcic material of 
the bones will all be removed leaving behind 
it a skeleton of the same size and shape, of 
organic translucent gelatinous matter, which 
was the real living thing of the whole bony 
structure when it was in the living human 
body* A complete body of subtle substance 
contained within and bounded by the living 
human body of matter is of itself no more 
marvelous than this secondary skeleton of 
matter contained within the bony structure 
of the skeleton* 



It may be asked u If there be this body of 
subtle substance in intimate relation with 
the human body of matter, does it conform 
in any way to the shape of the body of 
matter ? " No necessity of that sort is readily 
apparent* But it is just as reasonable to ask 
44 Why not ? " It is a common infirmity of 
the minds of men who form the mass of the 
civilized peoples of the world — and this in 
distinction from the savage mind which 
readily pictures the u happy hunting 
ground " — that they have the habit of 
comprehending, after a fashion, that which 
they can see or hear or touch or taste or 
smell, but when their imaginations turn to 

29 



Whither 

that which is beyond the senses, they will 
have nothing: but the far away and the 
impossible* To them Heaven must be some 
vast distance afar and its inhabitants must 
be shadows, absolutely without substance* 
They will have no middle ground between 
matter and that which is absolutely unsub- 
stantial* Heaven might be far away easily 
enough but a being without substance, even 
God, is impossible* That nothing is never 
something must be accepted once for all* 
This "spiritual body " is a body of substance 
— substance that is necessarily superior to 
that of the body of matter* That substance 
is a necessarily live substance which must 
be sustained and nourished, not indeed after 
the earthly fashion, but after a fashion of 
its own, just as real and just as necessary* 
This necessity calls for a spiritual body with 
the capacity for assimilating nourishment 
after a fashion just as orderly and natural 
as that of the human body, however differ- 
ent and ethereal in kind or degree it may be* 
The spiritual body may or may not be in 
form like the mortal but that it is an organic 
structure is reasonably certain* 

The following are fair questions : u What 
necessity is there that man's spiritual body 
should have existence in this world ? ff 
"Why may it not be that the central 
spiritual spark at the core of the human 

30 



Whither 

entity quits the organism of matter at the 
death-change, enters the spiritual world with 
such endowment of character as it has ac- 
quired in this world, and there takes on by- 
growth its spiritual body as the kernel of 
corn planted in the ground first rots and 
then grows a new plant ?" The splendor 
of the diction of St* Paul's illustration occurs 
at once : u But some man will say, How are 
the dead raised up? and with what body do 
they come? Thou fool, that which thou 
sowest is not quickened except it die : And 
that which thou sowest, thou sowest not 
that body that shall be, but bare grain ; it 
may chance of wheat, or of some other 
grain : But God giveth it a body as it hath 
pleased him, and to every seed his own 
body*" As a matter of fact this illustration 
deals with nature's methods for the multipli- 
cation of living organisms, not with the 
continuity of the life of a single entity* 
There is no fact or reason which points to 
anything in the next world of that kind — 
either the germination of seed or animal 
conception, gestation and birth* The spirit- 
ual entity of the human ego in that world 
must necessarily have the experience of this 
world behind it for disciplinary reasons* 
Seed germination and animal-birth cannot 
be actualities of the next world* Force can- 
not exist apart from substance* Man's life- 
force can only exist in company with live- 
substance* Live substance is necessarily an 

31 



Whither 

organism* When the life-force of man quits 
the body of matter it can only quit in 
company with a living organism* That 
living organism is the spiritual body with 
which the human ego enters the next world* 



We are quick to assume that the body 
which we have after we are done with this 
body of organized matter is a finality* The 
evolution of Darwin does not point that 
way* Neither does the long evolution of 
the Buddhist* Neither does the quittance 
of the body of matter by the body of subtle 
substance* So far as analogies go they 
point to the possibility of further changes 
in that direction* The question is not of 
special importance to this discussion* The 
all important question is. u Do we have an 
existence consciously continuous with this 
present one after we quit this earthly ten- 
ement ? " 



The Buddhist belief in re-incarnation, as 
a normal and necessary experience, is a thing 
well known to many ; and it is taking 
hold of the western world under the name 
of theosophy* It is an idea that crops out 
in divers places* For instance, in the New 
Testament, thus x " And his disciples asked 
him. saying. Master, who did sin. this 
man or his parents* that he was born 

32 



Whither 

blind ? " And, again, with approval, in 
Charles Kingsley's " Water Babies " : 

"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; 
The soul that rises with us, our life's star, 
Hath had elsewhere its setting, 
And cometh from afar*" 

The thing in itself has nothing in it to 
stagger the imagination* It is easily con- 
ceivable that after a long period of more or 
less happy dream life in the next world (the 
Buddhist's u Devachan ff ) f the spiritual body 
may fail, as the body of matter failed and 
the entity at the core of it, a spark from God, 
go back to re-embodiment in mortal form, 
taking possession of matter at the moment 
of physical conception in the womb; and 
that this may be repeated many times — all 
under the dominion of immutable law. But 
to what end ? The Buddhist says that in 
each embodiment the ego is incarnated in a 
body and provided with an environment 
such as the conduct in the last embodiment 
deserved — good or bad, according to the 
behavior in the last earth-life. But the gate 
of oblivion shuts down at the beginning of 
each embodiment so that the re-incarnated 
entity has no continuity of consciousness or 
memory connecting with its earlier embodi- 
ments. The whole continuity is open to 
the entity later on but not then. To punish 
a horse to-day for misconduct of yesterday, 
when he can by no possibility connect the 

33 



Whither 

misconduct with the punishment, is the 
height of unreason* The re-incarnation 
theory seems to apply the same unreason 
to man's career* This is a cardinal objection 
that is generally urged against the theory 
of re-incarnation* 

The Buddhist would say that the last 
paragraph by no means utters the last word 
about the reason or unreason of the theory 
of re-incarnation* Turn back in imagina- 
tion to the days when our fore-fathers were 
cave-dwellers, naked, hairy, eaters of food 
uncooked, swift and fierce to fight, below 
the Australian Bushman in intelligence and 
not possessed of the most shadowy and 
rudimentary element of civilization* If we 
have souls to save they had souls to save* 
What sort of entities must they have been 
on their entrance into the next world? 
What could conscience or repentance do for 
them ? These questions make for the prob- 
ability of re-incarnaticn* Nor does the 
shutting down of the gate of oblivion at 
each new incarnation — with karma select- 
ing for the re-incarnated entity such a mortal 
body and such a mortal environment as the 
conduct in the last deserved — work such 
iniustice as seems at first blush* The forces 
which make for the development of man 
are constant and eternal* The human en- 
tity reaches a certain pitch cf development 

34 



Whither 

at the end of each incarnation. It begins 
right there when it begins again* The 
forces of development envelope it sleeplessly* 
It can hardly be said that the elements of 
eternal justice are absent from the situation* 
These are things which the Buddhist, from 
his point of view, would say* 

Buddhists and occidental believers in im- 
mortality both agree that the object of earth- 
life is development of the human ego through 
discipline but they do not exactly agree as 
to the nature of that development* To the 
occidental idea, development is improvement 
first of all in goodness and next in wisdom, 
with increasing power and happiness as a 
concomitant and result. To the Buddhistic 
idea, development is improvement first of 
all in what the Buddhist terms spirituality, 
meaning thereby the power and capacity 
of having absolute, positive and intuitive 
knowledge independently of study and rea- 
son; along with this acquirement of capacity 
for positive knowledge must go enough of 
goodness to prevent the spirituality from 
being one of evil eminence ; and the final 
goal is Nirvana, a condition of happiness 
soon to be considered. In the Buddhistic 
theory the power of knowing things posi- 
tively and intuitively is one of antagonism 
to intellectuality and reasoning. Whether 
the Buddhists deceive themselves as to the 

35 



Whither 

real nature of their spirituality is to fee seen, 
for instance, in the following; quotation from 
a lecture delivered in 1899, at the Jagannath 
College, Dacca, by Swami Abheyanada, it 
being a fair sample of advanced Buddhistic 
teachings* "Brahman, the One, the abso- 
lute Infinite, is the essence from which all 
things manifested proceed* I deny that 
Brahman is conscious for this would imply 
something outside of Itself of which It is 
conscious* I deny that Brahman is think- 
ing for this would imply something exter- 
nal to Itself of which It is thinking* I deny 
that Brahman has knowledge for this 
would affirm that there is outside of It 
something to be known* Brahman is not 
conscious but It is the essence of conscious- 
ness, Brahman is not thinking, but It is 
the essence of thought; Brahman has no 
knowledge, but It is the essence of knowl- 
edge* Brahman does not do any action* 
It simply is* ♦ ♦ ♦ Brahman, the Im- 
personal, cannot be worshipped because It 
is infinite*" This picture of a supreme 
being, the necessary source of consciousness, 
thought and knowledge throughout the 
universe, while not Himself possessing them 
needs no comment* This is simply reason- 
ing over-refined and inverted till it becomes 
artificial, fantastic and unreal* 



36 



Whither 

Under the Buddhistic plan, man is incar- 
nated on an average about eight hundred 
times on this planet in this "round," with 
Devachanic or heavenly dream-life intervals 
between each two incarnations, varying in 
duration from fifteen hundred to several 
thousand years each* These incarnations 
in order to be useful need to be a practically 
continuous course of development so far as 
the chain of earth-lives is concerned* A mil- 
lion bricks side by side give only the eleva- 
tion of a single brick* To re-learn the 
multiplication table a hundred times is not 
the equivalent of a progressive study in 
mathematics which finally masters the in- 
tegral calculus* It is not readily to be seen 
how the spiritual entity at the core of the 
human ego, can, at the beginning of an 
incarnation in the flesh, resume its develop- 
ment at the point of progress where it 
stopped at the close of its last incarnation* 
Each incarnation must, as a rule, give some- 
thing of development* Many incarnations 
should give a considerable aggregate of de- 
velopment* It would seem that the spiritual 
entity of the human ego does and must 
begin each incarnation as a babe, not only 
in things physical but also in things mental 
and spiritual* The babe that came into the 
world with a mental, moral and spiritual 
endowment which was the ripened fruit of 
many past incarnations could profit prac- 

37 



Whither 

tically nothing by an added earthly experi- 
ence unless, in the intervals of re-incarnation 
the whole world made progress in ratio equal 
to its own ; and the history of the world, 
with its waxing and waning civilizations, 
points to nothing like that* The submerged 
continents of Atlantis and Lemuria, which 
are a part of Buddhistic lore, forbid the 
entertaining of such an idea* If each in- 
carnation carried with it the fruit of all past 
experience this would be a most surprising 
world because of the semi-angelic nature of 
some of its inhabitants as compared with 
their fellows whose round of incarnations 
was of later beginning or varied through 
other causes* The world exhibits no such 
phenomena* 

The strongest of all arguments advanced 
by the Buddhists in support of the doctrine 
of re-incarnation governed by karma is that 
it accounts for the inequalities of human 
birth and environment of which the world 
is full, one child being born of healthy and 
moral parents into a home of wealth and 
education, from which he naturally proceeds 
to a life oj honor and success, while another 
child is born of parents diseased and vicious 
into a home of ignorance and poveity from 
which he naturally proceeds to a life of 
hardness, dishonor and crime* The Buddhist 
says that each gets the birth and environ- 

38 



Whither 

ment that his conduct in the last incarnation 
fairly earned; and that on no other basis is 
there justice in these inequalities of birth 
and environment* The explanation does 
not explain* Creature comforts are not the 
proper reward and outcome of spiritual well- 
doing'* and* on the other hand* punishment 
that is not remedial and reformatory, but is 
simply stern and relentless justice* lacks little 
of being ugliness* The reasonable success 
of any scheme of human development* if 
not simple justice at the hands of its author, 
demands that a human entity coming back 
for re-incarnation after an earth-life of bad 
conduct, shall be subjected to reforming influ- 
ences and not simply to punishment which. 
so far as he knows* is undeserved* And the 
influences surrounding a child born into dis- 
ease* ignorance, vice* and poverty, instead 
of being reformatory* directly tend to deeper 
degradation* At just this point of high 
importance the Buddhistic scheme signally 
fails* And while the Buddhistic scheme 
finds little difficulty in dealing with hered- 
ity, under present human conditions, it yet 
remains true that if the human race in gen- 
eral were bred with the same care as to 
hygiene and morals that a careful breeder 
of the lower animals applies as to desired 
characteristics, it would leave little place and 
opportunity for the working of the karmic 
scheme ; and meanwhile the past history of 

39 



Whither 

the race points to a time in the not distant 
future, as centuries go, when mankind in 
general will be thus bred* The question 
why the birth and environment of some 
men have so much more of misery in them 
than falls to the lot of others, is a part of the 
question why there are pain and evil in the 
world at all, a question discussed hereinafter* 
But this is surely an orderly universe predi- 
cating similar order in the immaterial realm 
with which it is interfused — order that must 
give ample compensation at some time and 
place for all unmerited suffering and hard- 
ship* 

It is both common sense and good judg- 
ment in their last analysis that "by their 
fruits ye shall know them," The Buddhists 
claim that the high priests of their religion, 
the Mahatmas, are wise far and away be- 
yond the rest of the world, having absolute 
knowledge and actual vision of the interior 
secrets of the universe and of the whole 
stupendous problem of existence in all possi- 
ble elaboration of detail* These masters of 
wisdom have never made a contribution to 
the useful arts or, outside of their philoso- 
phy, — which in an intellectual sense is a 
wonderful and fascinating thing — to the 
world's stock of knowledge* They have 
never permitted the great body of their co- 
religionists to comprehend their plan of 

40 



Whither 

salvation* Any excuse for such action, 
made alongside of this claim to the possession 
of vast wisdom, is hopelessly vitiated by the 
fact that any scheme which permits a few 
men to be the recipients of wisdom, to the 
exclusion of the many, violates that clear 
principle of natural righteousness which de- 
mands equality of treatment for all men* 
And with all this vast store of wisdom in 
their possession, the Mahatmas have per- 
mitted India with its hundreds of millions of 
people to be decimated and devastated by 
pestilence and famines, frequent and terrible, 
with no effort on their part to teach the 
people agriculture or hygiene. If it be 
answered that the life of the Devachanic 
intervals between incarnations is so much 
to be preferred to earth-life that it is not 
kindness to avert the passage to it at the 
hands of nature, the true and final reply is 
that the object of earth-life is development 
through discipline and that such premature 
shortening of earth-life aborts the very ob- 
ject and end for which men are born into 
this world* 

The Buddhist makes Nirvana the end, 
absorption into the God-head, a condition 
of "absolute consciousness which is non- 
consciousness/' Doubtless our present con- 
sciousness is a relative matter in that it 
distinguishes us from other things* God 

41 



Whither 

may have a consciousness not dependent on 
such relativity* And man may develope to 
a point where he has such absolute con- 
sciousness; that need not be discussed here* 
Nirvana means* for one thing, eternal rest 
and that is a conception which violates the 
fundamental law of our being which is con- 
scious activity — growth and progress which 
know no finality* A possible heaven of 
contemplation/' in the very presence of God* 
reached by a purified soul after myriads of 
ages of spiritual effort* will not be "rest" — 
stagnation* 

These pages use the word "He n in speak- 
ing of God. as is usual elsewhere* Were it 
not that it might savor of irreverence the 
word "It" would be used instead* The 
Buddhists are right in saying " It*" For if 
the universe has a God* such a being cannot 
possibly have the (psychical) attributes of 
sex — at least not of one sex alone* The 
word "He" is used out of deference to 
custom* 

A conception of a God of the universe 
more common than any other in the past 
and perhaps also in the present* makes Him 
a being of definite dimensional personality, 
of unimaginable splendor and dignity* local- 
ized in Heaven* at the center of the universe* 
seated on a radiant throne and receiving the 

42 



Whither 

adoration of shining hosts of saints and 
angels r endered in musical number of ravish- 
ing and unspeakable harmony* One writer 
puts it, in part, thus : " And immediately I 
was in the spirit ; and behold, a throne was 
set in heaven, and one sat on the throne* 
And he that sat was to look upon like a 
jasper and a sardine stone ; and there was a 
rainbow round about the throne in sight 
like unto an emerald* And round about the 
throne were four and twenty seats x and upon 
the seats I saw four and twenty elders sitting, 
clothed in white raiment ; and they had on 
their heads crowns of gold* And out of the 
throne proceeded lightnings and thunderings 
and voices*" It is a conception which gives 
God as a localized and dimensional being, as 
seeing all things in the universe from His 
throne in heaven and governing all things 
throughout the universe by His fiat, the 
exertion of His will projected from that 
center* It is a conception which makes all 
natural laws the creation of God and subject 
to change, suspension and interruption by 
Him* 

Nevertheless men have had before them 
a nobler conception of God* Thus Paul 
speaking to the Athenians on Mars Hill : 

44 God that made the world and all things 
therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven 
and earth, dwelleth not in temples made 
with hands; Neither is worshipped with 

43 



Whither 

men's hands, as though he needed any thing, 
seeing he giveth to all life, and breath, and 
all things; And hath made of one blood all 
nations of men for to dwell on all the face 
of the earth, and hath determined the times 
before appointed, and the bounds of their 
habitation; That they should seek the Lord, 
if haply they might feel after him, and find 
him, though he be not far from every one 
of us ; For in him we live, and move, and 
have our being/' 

Various causes have contributed to the 
wide acceptation by men of the conception 
of God as a being of definite dimensional 
personality having a local habitation* The 
foremost of these causes is that men's minds 
dealt with ideas of God and heaven at a 
time when all men believed that there was 
but one world, that the one world was essen- 
tially flat, and that it was stationary ; Gior- 
diano Bruno was burned at the stake in 
Rome as late as the year J 600 for maintain- 
ing that there are more worlds than one, 
and Galileo died in prison in i 642 where he 
had been many years, for denying that the 
earth is the center of the universe ; to the 
old beliefs heaven was naturally in the sky 
and that heaven was naturally God's home; 
we inherited those beliefs* Another of these 
causes is the inability of some minds to im- 
agine a personality (intelligent individual- 

44 



Whither 

ity) that is not dimensional, a personality 
pervasive of all things material and imma- 
terial in the universe. Another of these 
causes is the statement in Genesis that u God 
created man in his own image " ; and man 
has definite dimensional personality as well 
as local habitation* Another cause is that 
man is always a thing separate and apart 
from his creations* We have some faint 
appreciation of the marvelous mechanisms 
of nature, ranging from the bodily structure 
of insects in the summer air that only become 
visible to the eye in a sunbeam, up to the 
whirling worlds of our solar system* When 
man invents and constructs a Jacquard loom 
or a web-perfecting printing press the man 
forever remains apart from his creation ; an 
analogy seemingly perfect leads to the idea 
of a similar separateness of God from His 
works* 

There is no one place in the universe 
specially suitable for God or heaven* The 
importance of this truth cannot be over- 
estimated* The universe has no circumfer- 
ence and consequently no center* God can- 
not be localized in a universe which has 
neither center nor circumference* God is 
necessarily everywhere* On a revolving 
globe like ours, man cannot look u up " to 
heaven nor "down" to hell* That "God 
created man in His own image" is sure; 

45 



Whither 

man's intelligent consciousness could have 
come from no other source ; this is likewise 
a truth of supremest importance ; but it is a 
spiritual u image " not a bodily* Man's 
apartness from his creations has no possible 
analogue in God and His works; man util- 
izes a stream of water to turn a wheel and 
goes away, whither he will, leaving the 
wheel to turn ; he is able to do this because 
nature — God in physical manifestation — 
constantly lifts the spent water to the foun- 
tain-head ; there is no one but God to ren- 
der like service to God's creations* 

There is a conception of a God of the 
universe which consists with all known 
facts and with all reason that is not odd or 
fantastic. This is a conception that gives 
God as a being who has a mode of existence 
transcendent and external of all created 
things but who is also the primal* imma- 
terial substance from which all substance is 
formed and the primal force whence all forces 
proceed; a single, conscious, personal, in- 
telligent being existent from everlasting to 
everlasting; a being who suffuses, pervades 
and permeates by His substance, force, per- 
sonal presence and conscious intelligence 
every part of everything in the universe; 
a being who has, as uncreated and eternal 
parts of Himself, all natural laws, physical, 
mental, spiritual and whatsoever other laws 

46 



Whither 

there may be in the universe; a being* to 
whom all things are possible, and none other, 
that are consistent with such laws; the 
creator, by lawful and orderly process, of 
all things except Himself, whose motive of 
existence is love as infinite as the infinities 
of time and space ; and who through that 
love serves each one of us with infinite 
humility. There is no other conception of 
a God of the universe that does consist with 
all known facts* 

The not unknown conception which re- 
places Him by an unconscious intelligence 
is not only more odd and fantastic than the 
idea of a headless yet forceful man, but it 
forgets that we ourselves have consciousness 
which can only come from a fountain-head 
of consciousness* Something cannot be de- 
rived from nothing and consciousness cannot 
be derived from unconsciousness* Another 
conception of first cause which dispenses with 
a single overruling intelligence, conscious or 
unconscious, and gfives in place thereof a 
great number of different impersonal un- 
conscious forces — generally called collec- 
tively "Nature" — all self-existent, and all 
acting as if they were co-operating intel- 
ligently, flatly contradicts the fundamental 
fact of intuitive knowledge that intelligent 
action can only proceed from personal in- 
telligence* It multiplies enormously what- 

47 



Whither 

ever difficulty there may be in the conception 
of a single first cause by necessitating the 
conception of a multitude of first causes; and 
— like the conception of a single unconscious 
intelligence — leaves our personal conscious- 
ness derivable from nothing and nowhere* 

The conception of God already stated as 
reasonable and consistent gives Him as the 
immaterial primal substance of which all 
substance material and immaterial is formed* 
Any other conception gives matter as un- 
created and self-existent, along with God, 
from all eternity in the past to all eternity 
in the future* Matter uncreated and self- 
existent is a tremendous effect, without a 
cause. The strenuous student of truth has 
the right to object u So, in the same sense, 
is Goo an effect without a cause*" And it 
is true* But the existence of a higher power 
than man, the giver of man's planetary 
home, his life, intelligence, mentality, and 
consciousness is a surety* All of these, the 
planetary home, the life, the intelligence, 
the mentality and the consciousness are 
effects which each must have had a cause* 
None of these has, in and of itself, eternity 
behind it, for plainly there was a time when 
this world and all it contains were not ; each 
and all had a definite beginning* Man's 
consciousness, for instance, was necessarily 
imparted to him from without ; it is not a 

48 



Whither 

continuous inheritance, from man to man, 
through all eternity in the past ; the begin- 
nings of the world itself bar that* Such 
consciousness in man from age to age, thou- 
sands of millions of him, could only have 
been imparted to him by a higher power 
which necessarily had consciousness through 
all eternity in the past, for consciousness 
could never have existed at all as an ab- 
straction and apart from a living being and 
it never could have sprung into being from 
unconsciousness* The same considerations 
apply, in substance, to man's planetary 
home, his life, his mentality, his intelligence 
and to every possible substance and force in 
this world* Each of them had a beginning, 
so far as this world is concerned, and yet 
each necessarily had a source and cause 
eternally existent in the past* The perfectly 
evident co-operation and harmony of action 
of man f s planetary home, his life, his intel- 
ligence, his mentality and his consciousness 
conclusively point to a unity of cause, a 
single being* The name universally given 
to such a being is God* It is true that He 
never had a cause, but He is the only ex- 
ception* The impossibility of a localized 
God makes it impossible that any substance 
or any force can exist as a thing separate 
and apart from God* It cannot be too 
firmly realized that a universe without cen- 
ter or circumference cannot have a God in 

49 



Whither? 

any one place as distinguished from other 
places and that the God of such a universe, 
which our universe clearly is, must neces- 
sarily be in all places* A God that fills all 
space and all places leaves no room for any- 
thing anywhere except Himself. The sub- 
stances and forces of and in this world each 
and all had a beginning, thus conclusively 
establishing an eternally existent higher 
power which gave them to this world* A 
universe without center or circumference 
conclusively establishes that higher power 
as existing in all places, thereby, in the last 
analysis, excluding all other substances and 
forces from all places. Wherefore all sub- 
stances and all forces are of and from God. 

If matter is not self-existent, then the 
only thing of which it, or substance of any 
kind, can be composed is the substance of 
God, for something can never proceed from 
nothing; and in the last analysis everything 
that is substance must be God-substance. 
This applies to the frozen wastes at the 
poles and to those ethereal depths of space 
where the cold outruns the possibilities of 
the imagination. It applies to the tremen- 
dous but unmelting heat under the crust of 
the earth on which we live, and to the un- 
imaginable heat source at the sun. It ap- 
plies to the lily and the rose, and to the 
putridity which we loathe. Heat and cold 

50 



Whither 

light and darkness, growth and decay, in 
their relation to the human senses are one 
thing* In their relation to God whose senses 
are not human, they are necessarily quite a 
different thing* Decay is as natural and as 
necessary as growth ; it is the lawful and 
orderly process for the disintegration of mat- 
ter in one form preparatory to its reintegra- 
tion into another form. And this substance 
of God pervades all space and every point of 
it forever and forever. Each night the 
astronomer's eye or his photographic plate, 
may catch the light of a star which started 
from its source long ages before Christ was 
born. A rift of space of pure emptiness at 
any point would have hopelessly barred its 
way. No such empty rift of space exists. 
God's substance is everywhere* 

The consistent and reasonable conception 
of God already stated gives Him as the 
prir»al force from which all other forces 
proceed. And that means forces physical, 
mental, moral, spiritual and in all prob- 
ability, other forces of which we have no 
knowledge. God's substance is necessarily 
everywhere. All substance exists in com- 
pany with force. There is no such thing 
as inert matter. Matter is resolvable into 
atoms, a group of which more numerous 
than the combined armies of the world, 
might ride on the point of a needle and yet 

51 



Whither 

not be visible to the human eye aided by a 
microscope of the highest power* Each one 
of these atoms vibrates sleeplessly with an 
inconceivably rapid motion, millions upon 
millions of times a second* This is true of 
each brick in a building of to-day and of 
each stone in the hoary pyramids* It is true 
of the deserts and the iceberg's* It is true of 
the brazen statue and of the air we breathe* 
The rapidity of a cognate sort of movement 
in a rarer sort of substance than that made 
up of atoms has been studied with the result 
of finding that in order that a thing may be 
perceived to be red more than four hundred 
trillions (400*000*000.000,000) of the waves 
of light-ether must enter the eye in a second, 
and that there are other colors which call 
for seven hundred trillions* That force 
which accomplishes this universal vibration 
of atoms and the wave motion of the ether 
is, in the ultimate, necessarily God-force 
permeating all substance* God-force, the 
ultimate primal force, suffuses, permeates 
and possesses God substance at every point 
and place in the universe* 

God's primal substance and God's primal 
force are necessarily present everywhere and 
in everything* That primal substance and 
that primal force are necessarily part and 
parcel of God's being, not possibly to be 
separated therefrom* Their presence every- 

52 



Whither 

where necessitates His presence everywhere* 
His being includes consciousness or we never 
could have had consciousness* God is pres- 
ent in primal substance, primal force and 
conscious intelligence everywhere and in 
everything* Your body is made of His 
substance* Every force within or pertaining 
to you proceeds from His primal force* " In 
Him we live and move and have our being," 
is literally true, apart from mere sentiment* 
It is as true in a practical and homely sense as 
that two and two make four* 

We can trace the life-force back for some 
distance toward the primal force of God* 
We find our present ultimate in that direc- 
tion in the protoplasmic cell, the active thing 
in all that accretion of living organisms 
which we call growth* We find protoplasm 
dominated by a force which animates it, 
impels it along the avenues of living organ- 
isms and causes it to assimilate into the 
substance of those organisms* God's pres- 
ence, force, consciousness and intelligence in 
company with that protoplasm fully explain 
its life action* Nothing else does* 

God's presence in the lower animals can 
alone explain the marvelous thing we call 
instinct — a thing that man himself relies 
upon till reasoning intelligence comes to its 
kingship, for it is that which makes the 

53 



Whither 

human babe turn to its mother's breast 
We see the birds weave their nests in vast 
variety of architecture ; we see the bee con- 
struct its mechanically perfect comb-cell ; we 
see the spider spin its web with more than 
the skill and delicacy of any human mech- 
anician; we see the squirrel in fall lay by 
its store of nuts for winter; we see the 
musfcrat raise and thatch its reedy home in 
the fall for the young which will come in 
the cold and early spring; we see that musfc- 
rat re-oxygenate the bubble of his carbon 
laden breath against the ice under which 
he is swimming in winter and, re-breathing 
it, pursue its way, a past master in this par- 
ticular item of chemistry; we see the beaver 
locate his dam with what would be good 
judgment in man and build it with equal 
skill; we see certain ants (Lasius Ameri- 
canus) guarding and herding the little 
aphides with more care and skill than the 
human herdsman expends upon his cows, 
for the honey dew they produce; every one 
of these creatures wholly untaught* We 
see a thousand things of like nature* Noth- 
ing but the personal presence and direction 
of God can explain them, and that explains 
fully* 

Instinct can hardly be other than uncon- 
scious mind acting under the limitations 
imposed by the absence of consciousness 

54 



Whither 

and under other limitations imposed by 
the field of its exercise — for instance the 
absence of the senses in minerals — for in- 
stinct pervades the mineral and vegetable 
kingdoms as well as animal* Crystalization 
is a product of design* Design is not possible 
without mind* Instinct is unconscious mind 
moved by divine suggestion and working 
under the necessary limitations of evolu- 
tionary creation* The mineral* the vege- 
table and the brute kingdoms lead up to 
man* He is their evolutionary product* 
When consciousness is added to mind* when 
the babe first says u this is I/' reason and 
moral responsibility begin and the reign of 
instinct* as it has so far manifested itself* is 
near its end* Consciousness* reason and 
moral responsibility are God-like attributes* 
They are an awful as well as a sublime 
gift; by his use of them man must stand 
or fall* 

God's presence in the plants alone explains 
the qualities they have and the things they 
do* Sex prevails in plant life and plays the 
same part in reproduction as in animal life* 
Plants sleep in the absence of light and are 
more sensitive in that regard when young 
than later* Tree leaves have a plurality of 
buds and when frost kills the first growth 
a second bud promptly unfolds* The nip- 
plewort* the water lily* the marigold and 

55 



Whither 

their congeners open and close with the 
travel of the sun ; the water lily sinks below 
the surface of the water with the night and 
rises above it with the day. If the African 
marigold closes unduly it is a warning of 
rain; the Siberian thistle gives the same 
signal if it closes in the night* The water 
calthorp grows an air filled bulb in its leaf 
stalk to float the plant in the water* Plants 
have divers ways of vast ingenuity for dis- 
semination of their seeds; some have wings 
to ride upon the winds; some hooks and 
spines by which to attach themselves to 
roving animals; some aquatics equip their 
seeds with a bouyant net-work which takes 
them abroad upon the water and then de- 
caying* lets them sink; the blue violet has 
inconspicuous flowers which perfect the best 
seed close to the ground but when nearly 
ripe the stem grows quickly* thrusts the 
seed pod above the foliage and then* by a 
contraction of the edges of the opened pod* 
shoots its seed one by one into the air ; the 
false indigo (Baptisia). with its foliage* 
makes a globular shaped plant the stem of 
which breaks off just at the surface when 
the seed is ripe and rolls in the wind like a 
ball across the fields* sowing its seed by the 
way; the clover gives a special few of its 
seeds a durable overcoat that those few may 
persist even if the great uncoated majority 
perish* Plant fertilization has its wonders* 

56 



Whither 

the English arum attracts insects into its 
flower by nectar, then, by an arrangement 
of hairs in the constricted throat of the blos- 
som, imprisons them till its anthers are ripe 
and shed their pollen on the prisoners, next 
by the withering of the hairs, lets the insects 
escape, laden with pollen to fertilize other 
blossoms of the same species* " The female 
valisneria lies rolled up under the water, out 
of which it lifts its bud to bloom in the open 
air; the male then loosens itself from the 
too short stalk and swims to her with his 
dry blossom dust*" Only mind can do these 
things* And the only mind available for 
doing it is the divine mind* 

The mineral kingdom, the so-called in- 
animate world, is equally the arena of God's 
presence and power* All matter, dead and 
inert though it may be to every human 
sense, has in it motion and energy outrun- 
ning our comprehension* Matter is made 
up of atoms each one of which vibrates five 
hundred millions of millions of times a sec- 
ond* There are varied manifestations of 
vast energy (that which is or may become 
force) in matter; chemistry treats of little 
else* There are elements seemingly force- 
less in themselves which brought together 
give the high explosives* Crystalization is 
one of the wonders of the mineral kingdom* 
There are acids which dissolve the metals 

57 



Whither 

and alkalies which corrode them* Fire and 
flame, common though they be, are un- 
solved mysteries* There are drugs which 
excite the animal system to intoxication 
and those which deaden it to insensibility* 
All the pages of this book would not suffice 
to catalogue the manifestations of energy 
known to man proceeding from so-called 
inanimate matter* There is no final ex- 
planation of all this except that which 
locates it in the primal, conscious, intelli- 
gent force of God* 

In the processes of animal and vegetable 
life, abnormal manifestations occasionally 
appear. Children are sometimes born blind, 
idiotic or otherwise defective, and things of 
like sort happen to animals of lower degree* 
And instinct sometimes seems to work as 
blindly as when a hen is kept to her nest 
by an artificial egg. Such facts seem to be 
inconsistent with the immediate presence of 
God as the energizing and directing force 
in processes where such happenings occur* 
The seeming incongruity disappears in the 
light of the truth that God is law as well as 
love, and that necessarily — law that is a 
part of His being, an uncreated part of His 
being* His omnipresence energizes all pro- 
cesses but His law directs; it is law of 
universal application that knows no sus- 
pension or interference by Him* In the case 

58 



Whither 

of abnormal manifestations in life-processes, 
even human perceptions so often see the 
cause to be disobedience of natural law as to 
warrant the conclusion that it is always the 
cause even though the disobedience be some- 
times unwitting or committed by another 
than the sufferer* And when instinct works 
blindly it is unconscious mind working by 
exterior (divine) suggestion, after a fashion 
akin to that in which the human mind 
works in hypnotism — mind to which con- 
sciousness and reason have not been — and 
under the necessary limitations of evolution- 
ary creation cannot be — added* 

One of the chiefest gifts to man is that of 
consciousness* Without it immortality itself 
would be valueless* One might as well be 
dead as not to feel and know that he lives* 
Unconscious human existence is exemplified 
in sleep that has no remembered dreams* 
The gift of consciousness could only have 
come to us from a conscious being* A 
conscious God is the only thing that can 
impart consciousness to all men in long 
succession of generations, age after age* 
Consciousness never wakes in the course 
of evolution, Darwinian or Buddhistic, till 
the animal kingdom is reached* The ani- 
mals below man feel consciousness and 
individual identity blindly and dumbly* It 
is reserved for man to feel and think it* 

59 



Whither 

Observation and intuition both teach that 
fact* It can never leave man, the teal man, 
in any further development* When the 
spiritual body quits the body of matter, life 
and consciousness necessarily go with it* 

The only conception of the origin of that 
part of man which thinks, which reasons, 
which recognizes right and wrong and 
which is sensible of individual identity, that 
will consist with all known facts and with 
all sane and healthy reasoning, is that it is 
a spark of God's own self, detached from 
His infinite being in the sense that man has 
his own individual consciousness* The most 
reasonable conception of its history is that 
this spark is first launched into matter in 
the mineral kingdom, at the gathering of 
the world-mist in the sky, with all its po- 
tencies dormant except such as are necessary 
to its existence there ; that it passes on into 
the vegetable kingdom and makes the 
gamut of that kingdom with other poten- 
cies , wakened* That it emerges into the 
lower regions of the animal kingdom and 
works its way upward through successive 
grades, with new powers waking into life 
at each step of the ascent; and that the 
divine spark — now become man — eventually 
quits matter by the process we call death 
and passes to higher phases of life and de- 
velopment in a body of subtle substance 

60 



Whither 

which may well be called a "spiritual body*" 
Mind inheres in the immortal spark from 
the first but it is unconscious, unreasoning 
mind, working: wholly by divine suggestion 
until humanity is reached* As man's spirit- 
ual body must begin its growth with that 
of the physical body, at the instant of phys- 
ical conception, it is not conceivable or pos- 
sible that the spark of and from God takes 
up its dwelling in man at any later period* 
The spiritual entity at the core of the human 
ego has had eternal existence in the past as 
a part of God's being* It has an immortal 
future in store ; as a part of God's being it 
can never die* 



A human being evidently consists, in the 
main, of three parts* First, a conscious and 
individual something — substance not shad- 
ow — of and from God which has the potency 
of eternal growth in goodness, wisdom, hap- 
piness and power* The word "spirit" or 
the word "soul" serves as a name for this 
something* In it, life, mentality, character 
and all feeling except sense-perceptions and 
fleshly desires inhere both in this world and 
the next* Second, a body of organized 
subtle substance which may well enough 
be called the " spiritual body*" Third, the 
body of organized matter which serves to 
receive and transmit sense-perceptions and 
which is the seat of all fleshly desires* The 

61 



Whither 

connection of the spirit is evidently in the 
first instance with the spiritual body, and 
through that with the mortal* The mind, 
an attribute of spirit, acting through the 
spiritual organization, is in connection with 
the physical brain under all ordinary condi- 
tions; what further connection, if any, there 
is between the spiritual and mortal bodies can 
only be conjectured* When the body of 
matter fails to a certain degree that failure 
severs the connection with the spiritual body 
which then, in freedom, quits the body of 
matter forever and, by the mere act of quit- 
ting, finds itself in the spiritual world, a world 
which surrounds us here in the mortal for it 
is by no means rare that spiritual vision 
breaks upon the consciousness of the dying 
while yet in the flesh, like sunlight through 
a cloud-rift, and that he who is passing sees 
and essays to speak to friends who have 
gone before* 

It is not uncommon to hear good men 
express scorn of the idea that they are 
ascended, in the evolutionary sense, from 
what we are accustomed to call the lower 
animals* It is to be remembered that all 
things in creation are just as much the work 
of God as is man himself* And what He 
has found necessary to make, especially of 
His own substance and pervaded by His 
conscious intelligent presence, is not to be 

62 



Whither 

scorned or to be considered "common or 
unclean "; certainly not by the clear-eyed, 
reverent soul* This truth of God imma- 
nent by substance, force and consciousness 
in all things that have substance is to be 
faced even though our human senses forbid 
us to dwell on it, as to some things, with 
pleasure* We loathe putridity; we have 
good human reasons for it; and we can 
readily suspect deeper disciplinary reasons 
for it in God's providence* But there is 
easily an eminence of vision which regards 
it very differently and to which its forma- 
tion of God's substance and pervaded by His 
presence is not abhorrent* There is but one 
creator in the universe* He created all 
things* A conception of God immanent in 
only the things which to our senses seem 
good and absent from those which to our 
senses seem bad is barbaric and childish* 

Verse twenty-six of the first chapter of 
Genesis says "And God said, Let us make 
man in our image, after our likeness ; and 
let them have dominion over the fish of the 
sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over 
the cattle, and over all the earth, and over 
every creeping thing that creepeth upon the 
earth/' This statement clearly relates to 
the psychical and not the physical nature of 
man — it relates to man's spirit; the refer- 
ence to the "dominion" man is to have 

63 



Whither 

shows that ; there are many animals that 
have greater physical strength than man. 
The next verse says, " So God created man 
in his own image, in the image of God 
created he him ; male and female created he 
them/' Verse seven of the next chapter 
says, " And the Lord God formed man of 
the dust of the ground, and breathed into 
his nostrils the breath of life ; and man be- 
came a living soul*" These are plain, clear 
and intelligent statements that man's body 
is formed of u the dust of the ground " and 
that his indwelling self proceeds from God 
and is a thing in the " image " and u like- 
ness " of God* And these are statements in 
perfect accord with all known facts, with 
right reason and with common sense* There 
is no other possible source of the intelligent 
consciousness of man than God. 



Verse thirty of chapter ten of the Gospel 
of John makes Christ say, u I and my Father 
are one/' As God is immanent in the entire 
substance of the human body and as man's 
indwelling self proceeds directly from God 
and is in His "image" and "likeness," 
that was true not only of Christ but is also 
true of all men* These pages make no issue 
with anyone who holds that Christ was one 
with God in some other sense* It is enough 
for the purpose of these pages to point out 
the oneness of all men with God* The im- 

64 



Whither 

measurable dignity of the fact that every 
human body is the temple of the ever living 
God outruns the possibilities of the imagina- 
tion* 

The oneness of man with God throws an 
illuminating light upon some of the most 
important of Christ's sayings as reported to 
us* That the person called Christ in the 
New Testament did live on this earth is an 
allegation of historical fact that does not 
admit of reasonable doubt* That the central 
motive of His being was love of the same 
kind that is the central motive of God's 
being is clear* That he had an insight into 
the deep truths of existence needs no proof* 
That his life was devoted to the service of 
God and the enlightenment of man is readily 
seen* That through his clear insight into 
the deep truths of existence* he may have 
acquired a mastery over the laws of nature 
which enabled him to do things which were 
" miracles n to our lesser insight* is probable* 
Corollating the indisputable facts of Christ's 
life and character with the fact of the one- 
ness of man with God* the man who is 
both reasonable and unprejudiced can have 
no cause for ignoring or totally rejecting the 
founder of the Christian religion, however 
much such a man may differ with theolo- 
gians as to doctrine and dogmas* 



65 



Whither 

The conception of God already stated 
gives Him as not only creating us but also 
serving us with a humility which can only 
be adequately described as infinite* Christ 
washing the feet of the disciples but faintly 
symbolizes it. The propositions that a thou- 
sand years in His sight are but as a watch in 
the night, that not a sparrow falls to the 
ground but that He notes it and that the 
very hairs of our heads are all numbered, 
fall immeasurably short of stating the actual 
fact as to the sleeplessness of His care for us, 
each one of us — there is more than enough 
of Him for that — and the infinite detail 
of it. 

Why should God do this ? There is one 
explanation which is ample, and only one* 
The central motive of His being is love, the 
infinitude of which is no more to be com- 
prehended by our minds in their present 
development than are the infinities of time 
and space — indeed far less so. He spends 
His time from all eternity in the past to all 
eternity in the future in creating individually 
conscious beings, with suitable environment, 
and leading them, by lawful and orderly 
processes of development, to higher and 
higher phases of existence, with resulting 
and consequent advance in happiness ana 
enjoyment. This is the only occupation 
possible to a being who already hath all 
knowledge. 

66 



Whither 

If it be so that conscious life goes on after 
we quit the organism of matter, then in 
what place do we dwell? Where should 
that place naturally be — at least for the 
next phase of existence — except in connec- 
tion with this globe ? Evidently there are 
other worlds of matter more or less like our 
own and that without number. It is reason- 
able and natural to think that they are occu- 
pied by beings more or less like ourselves — 
for immaterial beings cannot use a material 
world — who, like us, are subject to a quit- 
tance of the organism of matter after the 
fashion which we call death. In such case 
the natural place for the next phase of ex- 
istence is in an immaterial world interfused 
with the material world. Fact and reason 
strongly indicate that we are separated from 
the next world only by the veil that divides 
the material from the immaterial. It is not 
a thing exceedingly rare that the dying see 
their spiritual kin before they have com- 
pletely quit the mortal. In any attempt to 
locate the next world in the far-away, the 
imagination is afloat on a shoreless sea. 
The universe is infinite in extent. An in- 
finite universe can have neither center nor 
circumference. You cannot look "up" to 
Heaven nor "down" to Hell. Those lines 
of direction change every instant, exactly as 
do the spokes of a revolving wheel. The 
direction which is "up" at ten o f clock in 

67 



Whither 

the forenoon is directly "down" at ten 
o'clock at night* In first regarding the 
idea of an immaterial habitation on or 
around this globe the objection naturally 
arises that the material occupants, mineral, 
vegetable and animal must be fatally in 
the way of the immaterial. To that it 
may be said that the substance of the 
immaterial world is necessarily so subtle 
that it is practically nothing to matter and 
matter is practically nothing to it* And it 
is to be remembered that the heat and 
cold and probably the light and darkness 
apprehended by our human senses are not 
apprehended in the slightest degree by the 
immaterial, the spiritual world* There may 
well be a " light that shineth in the dark- 
ness and the darkness comprehendeth it not/' 
One form of it is exemplified even for mor- 
tals in the Roentgen ray* 

Most, if not all of us, feel a reluctance to 
take up our abode in the so-called u world 
of shadows*" It is a reluctance which should 
vanish on reflection* The spirit of man 
dwelling in the subtle substance of the spirit- 
ual body, freed from matter, must have the 
capacity and potency of being instinct with 
life, force and mentality immeasurably be- 
yond its capacity when immanent in and 
fettered by the body of matter* All forces 
of every sort completely elude the senses* 

68 



Whither 

We see and comprehend only the effects 
which they produce in matter* When our- 
selves freed from matter and living* in the 
immaterial, spiritual world we must be vast- 
ly nearer to those forces and to a compre- 
hension of them* The capacity for knowl- 
edge and its acquirement, the capacity for 
wielding the forces which control matter, 
the capacity for enjoyment and the capacity 
for everything that makes existence worth 
the having must be vastly and perhaps in- 
conceivably increased in the spiritual world* 
This subject will have further attention 
hereinafter when reached from another di- 
rection* 



While the spiritual entity of man freed 
from the organism of matter has the potency 
of and capacity for vast increase of powers 
and enjoyment, it does not follow that it 
possesses and enjoys such increase imme- 
diately upon quitting organized matter* It 
is not possible that the man who has to his 
credit a long record of love, good will and 
service to his fellow men goes, after the 
change which we call death, to the same 
kind and degree of experience as does the 
persistent and wanton wrong doer* And a 
theory of endless punishment — not endless 
torture — is wholly tenable; for the spiritual 
man may have endless regret for opportu- 
nities wasted or evil acts committed ; or he 

69 



Whither 

may always lag, in the race of development, 
by an interval, behind those who outstripped 
him in that race on earth. Cause and effect 
must be eternal verities quite as surely in the 
moral and spiritual world as in the physical* 
No power exists which can in the twinkling 
of an eye transform an ignorant man into 
a being of wisdom or a beastly criminal into 
an angel of sweetness and light* What the 
man was mentally, morally and in character 
at the moment before death, that he must 
be the moment after death and that he must 
remain until change in the nature of devel- 
opment takes place* And every step of the 
upward ascent in goodness and knowledge 
he must make for himself* That must be 
true of all worlds* 



Heaven, so far as it exists, cannot be es- 
sentially a place, but a condition* And Hell* 
so far as it exists, cannot be essentially a 
place but a condition* When man first 
makes his appearance in the spiritual world 
he is and must be the same person he was 
in this world, minus the mortal body, its 
pains and its impediments to the free work- 
ing of the spiritual body and the indwelling 
self* Now he no longer has speech but 
communicates much more readily and ac- 
curately with his fellows by the direct trans- 
mission of thought and feeling* Morally, 
mentally and in character he is naked* 

70 



WhUher 

What he knows, what he thinks, and what 
he feels ate known to all around him with 
absolute clearness* Worst of all, for the 
persistent and willful wrong doer, he now 
knows and recognizes himself for just what 
he is* Under such conditions the last thing" 
the thoroughly bad spiritual entity desires 
is the neighborly presence of the thoroughly 
good one* The latter would willingly be 
that neighbor for the purpose of extending 
a helping hand, but the former naturally 
flees the presence of the latter* Like con- 
sorts with like through all the grades from 
the lowest to the highest* 

A force that can sooner or later irresistibly 
impel even the thoroughly bad spiritual en- 
tity — with possible rare exceptions — to begin 
the upward climb is plain enough* It is 
the nakedness of his whole past, his present 
thoughts, his present feelings and his real 
character to himself and all around him* 
Memory now unrolls her scroll and every 
thought, act, feeling and perception of his 
human life is always before his gaze and 
the gaze of all around him. All our human 
experience in its slightest detail is photo- 
graphed upon the instant on an everlasting 
tablet* Very little of it can we recall in 
this world for the memory is a subconscious 
faculty evidently belonging peculiarly to the 
spiritual self and working by a law of as- 

71 



Whither 

sociation by no means wholly subject to the 
control of the will under its human limita- 
tions, but the record is all there* The de- 
lirium of fever not rarely makes the sufferer 
babble of things of which in his sane mo- 
ments he has no conscious knowledge or 
memory; hypnotism can stir the deeps of 
the memory in the same way* A sleepless, 
accusing conscience which cannot be dulled 
by any device whatsoever and which be- 
comes but the more strenuous the more it is 
resisted, working with all its reasons for 
accusing, in full sight and recognition, can- 
not — with possible rare exceptions — be for- 
ever resisted by the dullest, vilest and most 
beastly man that ever went from this world 
to the next. There, escape by suicide is 
impossible* This condition is Hell with all 
sufficient literalness. At some time, sooner 
or later, presently or after ages of suffering, 
the miserable spiritual entity is forced to 
begin the upward climb and then the longest 
of all single steps toward victory is taken, 
for thereafter the upward ascent must con- 
tinue forever. 

By what means shall the spiritual man 
accomplish his upward climb? , Repentance, 
genuine repentance, which would do all 
possible things to undo the wrongs of the 
past, with change of intent and desire that 
makes all further wrong doing hateful and 

72 



Whither 

impossible and fills the spiritual man with 
universal love is the large* part of the vic- 
tory* Beyond that there must be exhaust- 
less opportunities for work by the repentant 
wrong-doer in efforts to induce and assist 
other souls, infantile, ignorant, idiotic, in- 
sane, degraded and benighted entities, to 
enter upon the work of development and 
regeneration* Growth in knowledge and 
wisdom when one is more nearly face to 
face with the interior secrets of the universe 
needs no comment* 

Those who have taken it for granted that 
the New Testament does not permit one to 
entertain the idea of repentance and reform- 
ation in the next world may well consider 
certain sayings of Paul and Peter* Paul 
wrote in one place, "Why are they then 
baptised for the dead?" and it was of his 
dead friend Onesiphorus that he wrote in 
another place u The Lord grant unto him 
that he may find mercy of the Lord in that 
day*" And thus Peter, u For Christ ♦ ♦ * 
being put to death in the flesh, but quick- 
ened by the spirit ; by which also he went 
and preached unto the spirits in prison; 
which sometime were disobedient ♦ ♦ ♦ n 
And again, "For this cause also was the 
gospel preached to them that are dead*" 



73 



Whither 

But why should all this hard experience 
be necessary for any man spiritual or hu- 
man? Why is evil in the world at all? 
Why did God not make the creatures of our 
sort incapable of sin and endowed with hap- 
piness, pure and undefiled forever and for- 
ever ? It is a common conception of God 
that he can do any act that can possibly be 
imagined in any imaginable way, time and 
manner ; that is usually what is meant by 
the words u all powerf uL" There is nothing 
in all the vast range of the phenomena of 
nature and nothing in right reason which 
teaches such a thing as that* It is a purely 
gratuitous assumption* No power can make 
that right which is wrong, can make that 
white which is black or can make two and 
two to be either three or five and there are 
different sorts of acts which are not possible 
of accomplishment by any power* The 
central actuating motive of the God who 
created and maintains us can only be love 
that passeth understanding; a passion of 
altruism which expends itself in creating 
individually conscious beings and leading 
them on to happiness* It is not conceivable 
or possible that a God possessed by such a 
central actuating motive would lead us along 
the hard path we tread if there were any 
other possible, easier way to happiness, in- 
telligent happiness, the happiness of a happy 
human being as distinguished, for instance, 

74 



Whither 

from the happiness of the ox that has eaten 
his fill of rich grass and is digesting it as he 
lies at ease in the grateful shade of a tree in 
his meadow* Is the human happiness better 
worth the having than that of the ox? 
How much would you give for the happi- 
ness of the ox even if made eternal ? How- 
ever much you fear that future which lies 
beyond the grave would you exchange its 
uncertainty iot a happy future like that of 
the ox ? 

This difference between the ox and the 
human received attention long ago* Let us 
turn to the book of Genesis again for an 
illustration which it affords* In chapter 
three it is said with reference to a tree in the 
Garden of Eden, u And the serpent said unto 
the woman ♦ ♦; For God doth know that 
in the day ye eat thereof your eyes shall be 
opened and ye shall be as gods, knowing 
good and evil*" Whereupon they ate "And 
the eyes oi them both were opened and they 
knew that they were naked/' Here we have 
a picture of a human, first, unable to distin- 
guish gravity from a grave-yard, naked and 
unashamed, and taking the same view of 
right and wrong that the ox does ; and after- 
ward we have the same human gifted with 
intelligence; and consequent knowledge of 
good and evil* The ox may gore his fellow 
in getting a better place in the meadow, but 

75 



Whither 

his act is not evil because he does not know 
that it is wrong to gratify his natural desire 
at the expense of his fellow ox* There can 
be no such thing as evil in the absence of 
that kind of knowledge* The knowledge of 
good and evil is a necessarily integral part 
of intelligence* And intelligent happiness 
toward which God is leading you and which 
transcends the happiness of the ox as Heaven 
transcends the earth, is only possible to an 
intelligent creature having knowledge of 
good and evil* 

But why should a knowledge of what is 
evil be necessarily associated in the human 
being with the power to do evil ? Let us see 
what evil is* It is not substance, having 
objective existence and dimension* It is al- 
ways an act either of commission or omission* 
The great body of all evil is an act done by 
a man in the gratification of a natural desire 
at the expense of the rights of a fellow man* 
More rarely the evil act, as in drunkenness, 
is an injury to one's self* In any case the 
evil act is the wrongful gratification of a 
natural desire* Such natural desires of men 
as are rooted in the fleshly appetites are 
necessary to the maintenance of life and the 
procreation of the human species* The phys- 
ical world of man could not go without them* 
All other natural desires of man are rooted 
in and are the necessary outcome of that 

76 



Whither 

neve* dying: impulse in man to better his 
condition which has resulted in the develop- 
ment of a Lincoln and an Agassis from the 
cave dwellers of the dim and distant past* 
These desires are a part of the working" of 
that evolutionary force which has brought 
man to what he is from conditions so low 
that we can hardly imagine them and 
which, now eradicated from the nature of 
man, would leave him to return to the same 
low conditions* 

44 The forces of nature are the fingers of 
God/' And this evolutionary force is the 
most* potent of them all* The power to 
know evil is a necessary part of intelligence* 
The power to do evil is a necessary part of 
that law of evolution which can be no other 
than one of God's laws — Jaws which are 
uncreated attributes and parts of God* If 
man is to climb to higher things, this and 
this alone is the path possible in the eternal 
fitness of things* Man's capacity to do evil 
exists in order that man may he a morally 
improvable creature; that statement covers 
the whole ground* Growth in love and wis- 
dom are all that can keep man from doing 
evil* And that growth will prove quite 
sufficient in the long result* 

Moreover cause and effect stand in eternal 
relation to each other, and this quite as 

77 



Whither 

much in the in the moral and spiritual 
world as in the physical* Intelligent hap- 
piness is the natural effect and reward of 
virtue* "We find in this world that all things 
worth the having are ever and always the 
product of struggle and of victory over ob- 
stacles encountered* It is inconceivable that 
a conscious being, endowed with a knowl- 
edge of a distinction between right and 
wrong and necessarily the power to do 
either* can reach the heights of wisdom or 
of happiness except by deserving it. except 
by struggling with evil and overcoming 
it. except by struggling with ignorance 
and overcoming it* Nothing for nothing* 
The clear equivalent of happiness is that 
virtue which is the effect of overcoming 
evil* So much consists in the nature of 
things, no more to be trifled with than a 
law of mathematics* 

Why is there pain in the world ? Why 
did God not make man incapable of suffer- 
ing? Especially why must the lower ani- 
mals — dumb to make protest and helpless to 
escape as they are — suffer as they do?" 
The use of bodily pain as a danger signal 
of the physical system of animals of all 
degrees needs no discussion beyond its mere 
mention* Pain is not rarely a protection 
against the abuse of self, wilful or neglectful 
and a proper punishment therefor* The pain 

78 



Whither 

that comes from sinning against health and 
hygiene, physical or moral, tends to prevent 
a repetition of the of fense* When pain is the 
result of an evil act its reason for existence 
harks back to the reason for the existence 
of evil, a question already considered* But all 
that has been said and all of like nature that 
can be said fails to explain the whole matter* 
It especially fails to explain a substantial 
part of the sufferings of the animals lower 
than man* The only thing which does 
completely explain it is that it is inevitable 
in that evolutionary plan of man's devel- 
opment which is the only possible plan* 
That this law applies alike to man and 
beast makes for the correctness of the Dar- 
winian and Buddhistic theories of evolution 
but that is a matter of no consequence to a 
seeker after truth* 



In the aggregate there is a great amount 
of suffering in the world which to human 
eyes is unmerited, as where nature smites 
man in a catastrophe, where animals prey 
one upon another, where children take the 
ills of heredity or other hardships from 
parents, where man is unjust to his fellow 
man, and where the lower animals have 
disease or are abused* A man of excellent 
personal character wrote, u If the maker of 
the world can (do) all that he will, he wills 
misery, and there is no escape from the con- 

79 



Whither 

elusion/' Another man of like excellence 
of character wrote, u In our planet waste, 
wreck and abortion hold divided empire 
with economy, perfection and fruitfulness*" 
And a third, " There is no absolute co- 
incidence between virtue and happiness*" 
The spectacle which this world affords of 
apparently wanton waste and unmerited 
misery, vast in amount, distresses some men 
who desire to believe in God, makes others 
honestly doubt His existence, and impels 
still others to affirm that there is no God, 
or at most a cruel one* The key to the 
mystery is this, "Man must work out his 
own salvation in all things/* In matters 
physical, mental, moral and spiritual man 
must find out for himself that which is right ; 
he must pursue it, follow it, master it and 
attain to it* God makes the original gift of a 
spark from His own being instinct with in- 
dividual consciousness and with the potency 
of gain and improvement without end* With 
that man must earn all that he ever possesses* 

This is not a matter of the will of God 
alone* It is a part of the eternal fitness of 
things* There is no other possible way in 
which our unending race of improvement in 
goodness, wisdom, power and happiness can 
be run* It is in accord with that divine law 
which has no law giver, which is an un- 
created attribute of God, existent from ever- 

so 



Whither 

lasting to everlasting, but in harmony and 
at one with the eternal fitness of things, 
that right and best way of which there can 
only be one way* All the physical laws of 
the universe are equally a part of that divine 
law which is at one with the eternal fitness 
of things and man must work out his sal- 
vation in all things, so far as this world is 
concerned, in the environment which they 
furnish and provide* And so it is that the 
lightning strikes the temples where God is 
worshipped; the hurricane destroys the 
home and goods of the man who is trying 
to serve God in singleness of heart* Since 
the trend of things physical must necessarily 
be upward unless the plan of creation is to 
end in final degradation, the stronger of the 
lower animals prey upon the weaker and 
the fittest survive; and since man must 
know evil and have the power to do evil 
in order to be a morally improvable creature, 
he is, in the aggregate, the cause of much 
unjust and unmerited suffering to his chil- 
dren and to his fellow men* 

We do not know whether it would have 
been right for God to have refrained from 
creating beings of our sort* It is not con- 
ceivable that He should so refrain, for that 
love which is the central motive of His 
being must overpoweringly constrain Him 
and occupation of that sort is the only 

81 



Whither 

occupation possible to a being; who already 
hath all knowledge* But let us suppose it 
conceivable* Nevertheless since He did enter 
upon our creation, the way in which it is 
done and is being done is the only way 
possible* 

And if all that which seems to us to be 
wanton waste and all that suffering which 
seems to us to be unmerited actually is such, 
and all that suffering is without specific 
compensation to the individual sufferer, how 
much ought it to count toward barring the 
working of a plan which, in the long result, 
gives individual consciousness and an eterni- 
ty of high degree to countless myriads ? Not 
the weight of a feather* As well balance a 
grain of sand against the material universe* 

So far as concerns the reign of tooth and 
claw among sections of the lower animals, 
we are much in the dark as to the amount 
of suffering it causes* It is certain that none 
of the lower animals suffers to a like degree 
with man in similar circumstances and some 
of them suffer little if at all under great 
physical injury* How much of their cries 
and contortions, under injury, is due to the 
instinct of self preservation and how much 
to pain we do not know* The lower ani- 
mals suffer not at all from fear of death ; 
they have no concept that death can come 

82 



Whither 

to them; and die once they all must. As 
they are not morally improvable creatures, 
untimely death does not abort the object of 
their earth lives in that regard* If, as seems 
inevitable, they are the vehicles of the divine 
spark, on its upward travel toward incarna- 
tion in humanity, then the quick coming of 
death is gain for the monad and the charge 
of reckless waste in nature's evolutionary 
methods falls to the ground. That suffer- 
ing of the lower animals which weighs most 
heavily on our attention and feelings, as it 
was doubtless meant to, is that which is 
wantonly, ignorantly or carelessly inflicted 
by man; it is chargeable against man in his 
final reckoning* 

We do not know how much of the appar- 
ently unmerited suffering of human beings 
is deserved. A man is not generally a com- 
petent witness in his own case about that. 
Some unmerited suffering has to be because 
of the necessary reign of physical law; 
other unmerited suffering has to be in order 
that man may be a morally improvable 
creature with liberty to do evil ; so much we 
know. It is conceivable that one of the 
spiritual laws of creation may be that all 
unmerited suffering, deprivation, and hard- 
ship shall receive ample compensation. It 
is inconceivable that there should not be 
such a law if it be possible. Cause and effect 

83 



Whither 

must be verity quite as much in the spiritual 
world as in the physical* Compensation is 
the natural sequence of undeserved injury; 
nature has implanted that intuition in even 
the rudest and most savage breast* Without 
it there is a break in a stupendous system 
every part of which excites our wonder and 
outruns our understanding* With it there 
is a chain of infinite perfection* Right 
reason establishes it* The compensation 
may not come in this world* but that does 
not highly matter* Important as earth-life 
may be in some regards it is after all only 
an incident of existence* 

This is an orderly universe* one in which 
law and order reign at every point and part 
of space* The protoplasmic cell and the 
vibrating atom teach it* The planetary 
systems far and near* some with their two 
suns or three or four, some with suns of 
crimson or blue or brown teach it* The 
comets in their mighty and seemingly erratic 
sweep* teach it* There is nothing in all the 
vast and multitudinous phenomena of the 
universe that does not teach it; and evi- 
dently God* even God* when he would create 
a system of worlds must take vast aeons of 
time for each part of the work* from the 
gathering of the world-mist into a whirling 
mass to the final production of living intel- 
lectual beings with an environment suited 

84 



Whither 

to their maintenance* In hundreds of direc- 
tions and thousands of instances, the telescope 
discloses in the sky the same process of sun 
and world making by which our own solar 
system came into being, gaseous masses in 
various stages of development from masses 
of pure gas with but a single element to 
those having several elements in differing 
degrees of condensation and density ; it has 
never entered into the mind of man tocon- 
ceive of the vast reaches of the timcwhich 
must elapse before these processes of creation 
eventuate in planetary systems* And the 
whole process does and must go forward 
under relentless law* The lesson of it is 
that God can only produce His mighty 
effects by processes which are governed by 
law* Instantaneous creation by fiat in the 
material world is not a possible thing* In 
all the eternities of the past no event ever 
happened that was not the product of law* 
And in all the eternities of the future no event 
will ever happen that is not the product of 
law* There is no realm of existence, ac- 
tivity, substance or force — physical, mental, 
moral or spiritual — that is not under the 
reign of immutable law* 

A writer who made a name in the world 
wrote this: "If the maker of the world 
can (do) all that He will, He wills misery, 
and there is no escape from the conclusion*" 

85 



Whither 

It is not true. The utmost that can war- 
rantably be said tending even apparently in 
that direction, is that God may not be able 
to prevent such misery in the world as is the 
result of the plan of which the world and 
its workings are a part* Lack of power to 
prevent misery differs by a world from 
affirmatively willing and causing it* One 
may truthfully answer to the proposition of 
the last sentence that the plan is essentially 
God's plan* And to that the true and final 
reply is that it is the only plan by which 
beings of our kind and nature can be created 
and developed into higher conditions* These 
considerations cover the whole matter and it 
still remains true that the proposition last 
above quoted is not, either in letter or spirit* 
Under no conditions does God wilt misery 
to men* 



The real, though possibly unconscious, 
bent of the mind of the writer just referred 
to is disclosed in his proposition just quoted 
and it is also disclosed two pages earlier in 
the same essay where he wrote : " It is one 
of Nature's rules and part of her habitual 
injustice that 'to him that hath shall be 
given, but from him that hath not shall be 
taken away even that which he hath*'" 
This writer's manner of using the last quota- 
tion is intended to discredit it* If he had 
kept the saying last quoted and the parable 

86 



Whither 

of which it is the outcome together, and had 
understood both, he might have seen that 
the teal and reasonable meaning of that 
saying is: "To him that hath improved 
that he hath shall be given, but from him 
that hath not improved that he hath shall be 
taken away even that which he hath/' In 
the minds of those to whom the logic of this 
writer is convincing, he wrought easy havoc 
with current religious beliefs, but the fact is 
that he failed to make much impression on 
the world at large because his logic is one of 
half-truths that is more in love with itself 
than with sweet reasonableness* 

This writer trampled upon men of straw, 
which were nevertheless very real men to 
those around them because of two widely 
held fundamental misconceptions* One of 
these fundamental misconceptions is practi- 
cally held by the major part of the whole 
world to-day and the other is held by nearly 
all men who believe in God* The first men- 
tioned of these misconceptions is that death 
is a calamity and disaster, the fact being 
that death, coming in its natural order, must, 
to the normal man, be just as natural and 
quite as much to be desired as birth* Hardly 
any of us can feel this truth, however 
much we may be convinced of it, because of 
the impressions branded into our very beings 
by the teachings of our early and tender 

87 



Whither 

years and because of the saturation of all 
our literature with distillations from the im- 
aginary darkness of the tomb* 

To begin with, it is the rarest of all things 
in the world that death is accompanied by 
fear or pain. Nature, God in physical 
manifestation, is a beneficent mother in that 
hour. The fear of death at all other hours 
in life is a matter of high necessity* Were 
it not for that powerful deterrent against 
suicide, the plan and object of our existence, 
here, which is development in goodness and 
wisdom through discipline, would utterly 
fail, for men would take refuge in death 
from trivial trials physical and mental* 
Physicians and others accustomed to attend 
on the departure of the human ego from 
this world know well that, as a rule, fear 
and pain are absent in the hour of transition 
and that when the passage is not veiled by 
unconsciousness the departing one is the 
least concerned of all present and not rarely 
gives evidence of pleasurable experience and 
anticipation* 

Silence, loneliness, shadowy existence and 
lack of avocations of human interest are 
the ordinary conceptions of life beyond the 
grave* They are false conceptions* That 
world beyond has been fed from this world 
for at least hundreds upon hundreds of cen- 

88 



Whither 

turies, thirty-six hundreds of millions to a 
century, and must be so populous that all 
the people on the globe are but a handful 
in comparison* Kind hands and hearts 
received us into this world and such must 
receive us into that, in such greater abun- 
dance and kindliness as, in larger numbers 
and high development, that world exceeds 
this* The "shadowy existence " must be 
really in a body of subtle substance freed 
from all physical pains and penalties and 
endowed with powers of perception, reason- 
ing, expression and enjoyment transcend- 
antly beyond those of the present* Do you, 
with regret, look forward to leaving the 
44 lusts of the flesh and the lust of the eyes 
and the pride of life ? " So you would have 
looked forward to manhood if the prospect 
had been presented to you in like fashion, 
when, as a child, you were coasting down 
hill in January or building mud-dams in 
April* Do you feel any desire for childhood's 
joys in the strength of your manhood ? Not 
but that in some cases certain of the lusts of 
the flesh may survive the death-change for 
a time* But it need be only for a time* 

And as for avocations of human interest, 
it is sure and certain that activity is the 
fundamental law of the human ego and 
that a future of endless rest woulo even- 
tually be one from which we should gladly 

89 



Whither 

flee into oblivion and annihilation* Some- 
one asked an ex -president of Harvard 
"What are you going to do when you 
enter the other life ? " And his answer was 
"There are enough problems, mathematical 
problems, connected with the arc of a circle 
to keep me busy and happy for at least a 
hundred years/' A chemist of the old days, 
John Beecher, said of himself and his re- 
searches "I seem to myself to live so sweetly 
that may I die if I would change places with 
the Persian king/' John Beecher is hardly 
unhappy in his larger opportunities of the 
next world* A student in any part of 
knowledge must there revel in his enlarged 
capacity and wider range of research* The 
causal forces which lie back of the external- 
ized phenomena of this world, the causal 
forces of the phenomena of the next world 
and perhaps eventually of all worlds must 
present fields for infinite and exhaustless 
study and investigation* Exchanging the 
slow and inaccurate speech of this world for 
instantaneous and accurate transmission of 
thought and feeling must be a part of the 
pleasure and profit of the next world* The 
art, the invention and the music of that 
world must be something unimaginable in 
this* Towering above all else to the vision 
of the soul that yearns to climb the heights 
Godward must be the opportunities for doing 
good, teaching, helping, succoring and ed- 

90 



Whither 

ucating the infantile, the ignorant, the in- 
sane, the idiotic, the degraded and vicious 
entities entering that world from this* The 
avocations of human interest in that world 
must be of far more surpassing value than 
in this* 

All men have experience which suggests 
the joys of the spirit triumphant over mere 
desire* To the inventor it comes when, from 
his brain, long in travail, a new idea is born 
into the world* To one it comes at break of 
day when from a favoring height he watches 
the sun detach itself from the far away hills 
— realizing that he is looking upon the 
turning of the very wheels of the universe* 
To another it comes on the ocean at night, 
when the moon throws a trail of silver 
splendor to his feet across a summer sea* 
To another it comes when a compelling 
orchestral harmony takes his soul skyward 
in flight more exulting than an eagle's 
wing* For another it is when he looks from 
a mountain's crest on an endless forest sea, 
which at the far horizon melts into the 
infinite blue* To all it comes when, by self 
sacrifice, we lighten the burden of a brother* 
Of such are the joys of the spirit fettered in 
the flesh* What must they be when we no 
longer see as through a glass darkly ? 



91 



Whither 

The death-change instead of being the 
climax of calamity and disaster can be only 
an incident in the existence of the human 
ego and to most, in its normal coming, a 
desirable incidents Its desirability for him 
whose good acts and intentions outweigh 
his bad ones needs no further comment* It 
must be desirable for the man whose evil 
acts and intentions largely outweigh his 
good ones, unless he be hopelessly and irre- 
deemably bad, an eminence in evil reserved 
for very few* 

The life of the human ego in this world 
is a necessity of existence but not the whole 
of existence* The death-change, vastly 
important though it be, is only an incident* 
The misconception of it as the climax of 
calamity and disaster has worked great 
mischief* But it is an idea that must lessen 
and eventually disappear* Graves simply 
hold empty shells of human lives and are 
instruments for turning back the mortal 
part into sweet and wholesome earth* Men 
will yet look forward to them with serenity 
and composure* We may not be able to do 
it because ol the mistakes of our forbears* 
Our children will be more fortunate in that 
regard* 

The other of the fundamental miscon- 
ceptions hereinbefore referred to relates to 

92 



Whither 

the question whether God is u all powerful ff 
in the sense ordinarily given to those words* 
Nearly all men who believe in God at all 
believe in Him rather thoughtlessly, as all 
powerful, in the sense that He can do any- 
thing imaginable or unimaginable, at any 
point of time imaginable or unimaginable, 
in any way imaginable or unimaginable, 
and in any period of time imaginable or 
unimaginable* When confronted with the 
question whether He can make white and 
black to be one and the same color, whether 
He can make right and wrong to be one 
and the same, whether He can make two 
and two to be either three or five, whether 
he can make something from nothing or 
something into nothing, it is at once seen 
that there are acts which are impossible of 
accomplishment by any power whatever, 
and that God's power is, in the eternal 
nature of things, limited to doing things 
that are possible, that is, consistent with the 
laws which are a part of His nature and 
being* 

We have a way of knowing what is 
possible with God by studying Him as He 
exhibits Himself in His works which are 
open to our observation and study in mul- 
titudinous array* It is interesting to note 
what Paul says about this u For the invisible 
things of him from the creation of the world 

93 



Whither 

ate clearly seen, being understood from the 
things that are made, even his eternal power 
and Godhead*" In all of them, from the 
vibrating atom tip through the marvelous 
mechanism of a blade of grass to our world 
swinging on its annual way eighteen and 
a half miles a second, and still on to the 
millions of starry suns so deep in space that 
man knows no way of making their distance 
comprehensible, we find that everything is 
subject to law which is relentless and that 
changes not* We find that in the creation 
of the blade of grass there must be the 
necessary time and the necessary conditions 
and that all must go forward under the 
control and dominion of immutable law* 
We find that in the creation of a habitation 
for men God must take periods of time, the 
fractional part of which staggers our im- 
agination; that the matter utilized must go 
through a vast number of changes, each of 
long duration, subject now to heat and then 
to cold, now to volcanic action and then to 
grinding glaciers; and that even after the 
stage of animal and vegetable life is reached 
both must come down through forms gi- 
gantic and seemingly grotesque to the de- 
velopment suited for man's surroundings* 
All creation teaches with a voice that is 
clear and unmistakable that all of God's 
acts are in pursuance of law that is immut- 
able* relentless and changeless* There is 

94 



Whither 

nothing; in creation that has in it the re- 
motest suggestion of any act being possible 
to God that does not proceed in a certain, 
orderly and changeless way* 

Whenever these pages discuss what is 
possible with God, they do not undertake 
to say what might be possible with Him as 
a matter of absolute power* For instance, 
if He were subject to fits of anger like a man, 
with moral sense for the time being prac- 
tically non-existent, it is conceivable that 
He might, so far as the absolute power to 
do it is concerned, destroy our solar system 
in an instant* It is idle to speculate as to 
what God's power is irrespective of moral 
law — or of law of any kind* He has never 
exhibited Himself to us in any way that 
justifies any conception of Him as not being 
or at least holding Himself subject to law — 
moral or physical, mental or spiritual* These 
pages deal with God as He is, not as He 
might be if He were not what He is* 

The idea that anything is possible for 
God except that which proceeds in a certain, 
orderly and changeless way is essentially a 
disorderly, lawless and riotous conception of 
Him* The only consistent view of natural 
laws, physical, mental, moral and spiritual, 
makes them uncreated and uncreatable, 
eternal and changeless parts of God's being, 

95 



Whither 

the best that is possible in each case con- 
sistently with the eternal fitness of things* 
This conception of God's power is consistent 
with the existence of pain and evil in the 
world alongf with God's infinite love* It is 
not a reasonable conception that God can 
will a universe into being" to-day and into 
nothingness to-morrow* And it is evident 
from what he does that he cannot create an 
intelligent being of our high degree except 
by the evolutionary plan which involves 
development through discipline* Any other 
conception of God's power than this rejects 
the teachings of His works exemplified 
throughout the universe* 

The necessity of the evolutionary plan — 
which for the purpose in hand is practically 
experience of pain and evil and victory over 
them — for man's development — which is 
practically improvement in goodness, wis- 
dom, power and enjoyment — throws light 
upon some otherwise dark things. "Whom 
the Lord loveth he chasteneth " seems on its 
face a hard and unkind saying. Its real 
meaning is quite the reverse of unkind and 
that meaning is not far to seek. That wise 
father whose son. athletic of mind and body* 
is destined for a profession which needs great 
and difficult attainments for high success 
therein, does not rest content when the son 
simply acquits himself fairly well in his 

96 



Whither 

studies* The son's strength of mind and 
body justifies more than that* And the wise 
father requires more than that* The son 
may not like the enforcement of the re- 
quirement in the days of hardness, but when, 
in the later result, he stands forth a prince 
among: his fellows, he looks back and blesses 
the wisdom and firmness of the father. The 
prizes that man may attain through devel- 
opment are of a value that cannot be ex- 
pressed in any terms our language knows* 
The laws of the universe, God's laws of 
universal application, not "special provi- 
dence," fit a man's spiritual burden to his 
capacity for burden-bearing. He that has 
the larger capacity and therefore the more 
to endure may be pitied by his fellows, but 
a larger wisdom knows that he is speeding 
toward a kingdom which his fellows are 
approaching with slower foot. His fellows 
might stand unpleasantly surprised if they 
realized the full significance of the difference* 

Men who devote themselves exclusively 
to the pursuit of wealth, pleasure, fame, 
knowledge, power or distinction of any sort 
are, with their present vision, quite likely to 
stand appalled at the idea of courting an 
athletic spirituality involving development 
through severe trial* They might be sur- 
prised to know that there are men of ath- 
letic spirituality, under development through 

97 



Whither 

trial, who would assuredly and truthfully tell 
them that while appreciating the good things 
of this world in right and reasonable fashion, 
they would by no means change places with 
their seemingly more fortunate fellows and 
that there are compensations of immeasur- 
able value even by the way* No man ever 
yet surmounted a trial completely without 
feeling thankful for it and realizing lasting 
blessing therefrom* However, a man will 
not go to Heaven because he is poor or to 
Hell because he is rich* Clearly a rich man 
can serve his fellow man, which is serving 
God, quite as acceptably as a poor man, but 
he may not accomplish it by endowing a 
hospital or founding an institution of learn- 
ing* Heaven is not purchasable* The way 
in which a man gets his money must be of 
quite as much consequence, in the spiritual 
reckoning, as the way in which he spends 
it* When you discover the Kingdom of 
God, you will find it within you. 

To an eye which sees all things there is 
no such thing as an accident* In the human 
sense there is abundance of luck and abun- 
dance of accident, but not to the knowledge 
and vision which comprehends all things* 
To that vision and knowledge the cause is 
clear which leads one man to stumble over 
a stone which discloses a gold mine and 
another man to death by drowning through 

98 



Whither 

the sinking of a bridge into a rushing* tor- 
rent* We see only one side of the tapestry 
which the looms of eternity are weaving; 
if we could see all the strands as they are 
laid, in front and rear, we could understand 
the significance of otherwise mysterious phe- 
nomena which appear on the surface open 
to our gaze* We speak of the appearance 
of a Washington, a Bolivar or a Lincoln, at 
a critical period of the affairs of a people, 
as providential, meaning a special interpo- 
sition of Divine Providence* It is provi- 
dential but not special* The universe needs 
to work by and through immutable laws* 
The universe which had its laws suspended 
or wrenched out of their orderly working 
could not work at all* But God's wisdom 
and plans are large enough and far seeing 
enough to provide in their orderly working 
for a Washington, a Bolivar and a Lincoln 
at the time of their critical need* And they 
are large enough and far seeing enough to 
provide for all contingencies to the minutest 
detail* 



Are there then no such things as miracles? 
Not if it is to be understood that a miracle is 
something not wrought in accordance with 
eternal and immutable law* If a miracle is 
simply some happening that is far and away 
out of the ordinary, transcending all we 
know of law, then there may well be mira- 



L«rc. 



99 



Whither 

cles* A man who should freeze water in 
the presence of some tribes of men in the 
heart of Africa would perform that which 
would be for them a miracle, something far 
outrunning all their knowledge and all their 
powers of imagination, for nothing ever 
happened to their knowledge which would 
indicate the possibility of such a thing* If 
a hundred years ago a man, being in New 
York, had said u Yesterday I dined with a 
friend of mine on the shore of Lake Michi- 
gan, and he has told me in the last few 
minutes that he will be here to-morrow," 
and they to whom he said it had believed 
it, they could only have believed him on 
the assumption that a miracle had been 
performed* But the thing may be said and 
done to-day and evoke no surprise or com- 
ment* Shakespeare makes Puck say m I'll 
put a girdle about the earth in forty min- 
utes n and for some hundreds of years this 
stood as the extremest flight of fancy ; now 
we can girdle the earth a number of times 
in that same forty minutes* So much of 
undiscovered law remains that we are in no 
position to say what things are possible, but 
that nothing ever did happen or ever will 
happen except in accordance with law, we 
may be very sure* 

100 



Whither 

Whence come the laws which govern ihe 
universe in all its parts and aspects? It is 
not uncommon to hear it said " The exist- 
ence of law necessarily implies the existence 
of a law-maker." That idea carries the 
implication and consequence that the law- 
giver might, if he would, change the laws* 
Now in the forum of absolute and eternal 
right there can be but one right, best and 
lawful way of doing a thing* Clearly God 
is not capable of doing a thing except in the 
right, best and lawful way* Some one has 
said in poetic strain u The forces of nature 
are the fingers of God," and that is literally 
true* He did not make the laws* They 
are changeless parts and attributes of Him- 
self, from everlasting to everlasting* He is 
a God u in whom is neither variableness nor 
shadow of turning*" The only conception 
of the laws which govern the universe which 
consists with all known facts and with all 
sane and healthy reasoning, makes them 
eternal, changeless and uncreated attributes 
of God. Perfectly true it is that we cannot, 
with our present development of mind, com- 
prehend the first thing of such a being* But 
it is equally true that we cannot comprehend 
Infinity of time or space or substance or force 
or the sure eternity of life in the past and 
yet we know, and know beyond all question, 
that they are facts* 

101 



Whither 

It may be objected that the last paragraph 
makes toward fatalism* And good souls 
may ask "Is all prayer to God in vain?" 
And "Ate the heavens brass to the heart- 
rending petitions which constantly rise from 
crushed and bleeding human hearts?" It 
cannot be so* The thought and feeling of 
a human being can be imparted to another 
human being by direct transmission and 
without the intermediation of words or 
signs* The fact points to the conclusion 
that thought, at its source or origin, creates 
mind-waves in the ether which are received* 
felt and understood by some faculty in the 
recipient. When one cries to God, either by 
spoken word or unspoken thought* the cry 
goes not to one who is far away* He is 
closer to the petitioner than we can possibly 
conceive* His love and sympathy go out to 
each one. not generally but in particular* to 
the Digger Indian and the Empress of the 
Indies alike, in measure far outrunning hu- 
man capacity for love and sympathy* , No 
reason exists why He may not and does not 
make quick return* in spiritual strength, to 
the spiritual ego that seeks His aid aright 
in the manner that human beings transmit 
wordless thought and feeling. In such case 
the benefit conferred is doubtless measured 
by the petitioner's capacity to comprehend 
and receive* The human ego that can bring 
its mind and feelings into right relation with 

102 



Whither 

this fountain of spiritual strength, should be 
able to get from prayer strength to give 
mastery over all earthly conditions* The 
spiritual ego has the potency and capacity 
of dominating, even in a physical sense, the 
body of matter in which it is enshrined as 
well as adverse circumstances of environ- 
ments Prayer, heartfelt and sincere, ac- 
companied by belief in God's power and 
willingness to help and directed to proper 
ends, is a resort to a higher law capable, in its 
own way, of making the petitioner superior 
to all trials and conditions* 



We are told occasionally that matter, 
space, time and disease are not realities but 
illusions, in fact that the whole material 
universe, or that which we take to be such, 
is but a vast play of illusion, though why 
God should thus befool us has never been 
made clearly to appear* If this be true it 
makes no practical difference, for, in such 
case, the play is so perfect that illusory 
causes produce illusory effects with all the 
certainty, sequence and perfection of realities, 
wherefore we can only profitably discuss 
such causes and effects in terms of reality* 
The healing effects of mind-cure, faith-cure 
and Christian science do not depend on the 
unreality of matter, space, time or disease* 
Nor do their curative effects negative the 
curative effects of drugs* Our physical 

103 



Whither 

bodies respond to the physical and chemical 
effects of drugs* They also respond to men- 
tal impulses and that is the central truth of 
mental healing, faith-cure, Christian science 
and of that treatment by suggestion prac- 
ticed by the aid of hypnotism* There are 
diseases, tissue changes, mutilations and 
fractures which, with our present knowl- 
edge do not yield to surgery, drugs, or the 
other methods of cure but they are all re- 
medial in some cases* Treatment by sug- 
gestion is the truth that underlies mental 
healing, faith cure and Christian science ; it 
finds its most certain working in hypnosis* 
One thing that the consciousnes does is to re- 
late the mind to other — perhaps all — things 
external to itself; in doing this the con- 
sciousness also, in a manner, stands between 
the mind and other things somewhat like 
an interference* For lack of a better name, 
the consciousness, in the performance of this 
interf erin g function, may be termed the mind- 
sentinel* In hypnosis — whether induced by 
man or by a spiritual being — that mind- 
sentinel is practically wrapped in slumber, 
leaving a condition of mind which may be 
called dominant mind* It is a condition 
higher in degree but somewhat like in kind 
to the unconscious mind of the animals 
lower than man* This condition of domi- 
nant mind accounts for the happenings 
sometimes attributed to a subliminal self or 

104 



Whither 

a subliminal consciousness* The relating 
faculty of the consciousness accounts for 
the chaotic sequences of ordinary dreams; 
the sleeper, through disturbing: physical 
causes, wavers toward and from the waking 
state and the mind relatingf faculty of the 
consciousness works in exact sympathy of 
activity* The relatingf and interfering- fac- 
ulties of the consciousness, together, account 
for a great many important things, the dis- 
cussion of which here would take us afield* 
This dominant mind can and does act on 
the higher nerve centers with mighty force ; 
these in turn act with like force on the 
lower nerve centers; and these in turn act 
with like force on the organs and functions 
of the body* In hypnotism this dominant 
mind, prompted by external suggestion, 
readily rendered the body insensible to pain; 
it accelerates or retards the heart-beats and 
the circulation of the blood ; it makes the 
body strong or weak, rigid or flaccid; it 
simulates disease or heals it; in short it 
shows itself for what it is, the mighty mental 
monarch of the physical body* It does more 
than this ; under exterior suggestion it some- 
times alters the moral nature and improves 
mental capacity* A man can generally ap- 
peal effectively to this dominant mind, by 
and of himself, if he gently but firmly and 
persistently wills as he drops to sleep at night* 
when the activity of the consciousness is 

105 



Whither 

waning — and night after night — that his 
physical or mental state shall be bettered for 
the next day in a direction indicated in the 
willing, beginning this auto-suggestion with 
some simple requirement* Hypnotism, men- 
tal healing, faith-cure, Christian science, and 
cures like those at the shrine of Lourdes are 
all suggestions to this dominant mind and 
are effective in just the degree that they 
succeed in eluding or suppressing the mind- 
sentinel referred to* The dominant mind is 
subject to directions reaching it through mind 
waves in the ether from a mind concerned in 
putting the mind-sentinel to sleep* And per- 
fect conviction of almost any kind efficiently 
suppresses this mind-sentinel without notice- 
ably affecting the consciousness otherwise* 
The ether and the dominant mind are tools 
of God's own making* Where we know a 
little about them, He knows all about them* 
He can use them far more effectively than 
we can* The efficacy of prayer in results 
personal to the petitioner may find one ex- 
planation here* But that form of convic- 
tion, another name of which is faith, may 
be an element of supreme importance in 
prayer — to open the gate for God to enter* 
No man prays without some degree of faith; 
no man prays with the firm conviction of 
its hopelessness and uselessness* The greater 
the faith, the wider open is the door for God 
to enter* 

106 



Whither 

Mistaken beliefs on the part of those who 
are nearing the sunset of life on ear th, as to 
what they themselves really are, as to the 
nature of the death-change and as to the 
life beyond the grave have caused and are 
causing millions upon millions of men to 
walk all their later years in something 
worse than a vale of tears* Most men find- 
ing themselves then treated by the young 
as mere cumberers of the ground, realize for 
the first time the real meaning of the ad- 
monition " Honor thy father and thy mother 
that thy days may be long upon the land 
which the Lord thy God giveth thee/' Joined 
to this neglect, to have sight and hearing 
fail, the joys and appetites and illusions of 
youth disappear and comliness and strength 
merge into wrinkles and decrepitude is bad 
enough* If there be added thereto a gloom 
which at the tomb just ahead deepens into 
eternal night or hopeless doubt, the misery 
of it is insupportable, and the only grain of 
relief consists in ignoring with all one's might 
all thought of death and nursing every little 
possibility of entertainment and physical 
enjoyment* This is not what should be and 
not what would be if we were not weighted 
down by the awful inheritance of the wrong 
beliefs of the ages gone before* The com- 
pensations of age ought to outweigh its 
losses* In the vast majority of men the 
spiritual body necessarily grows in grace 

107 



Whither 

and beauty with the aging of the earthly 
tenement, a body of fat more enduring and 
important substance than all that goes to 
make up this solid earth or even the sun 
that gives it light and life ; long after this 
whole solar system shall have been resolved 
back to world-mist for purposes of new 
creation, that spiritual body or its superior 
successor must be in the fresh glow of im- 
mortal youth* It is stated that rays eman- 
ate from human beings which can be caught 
and fixed on a photographic plate in a room 
of absolute darkness ; if that be true the rays 
cannot be material and it is more than pos- 
sible that they radiate from the spiritual 
body* If we had eyes to see that spiritual 
body all material beauty of the human body 
must seem a poor thing ever after* It is no 
wonder that a great mass of negroes in 
America look forward with passionate de- 
light to escape from the universal contempt 
which we visit on their black bodies and 
revel in the anticipation of the spiritual 
body, one of whose highest attributes to their 
imagination is its whiteness* A knowledge 
of the growing grace and beauty of the 
spiritual body is entitled to be one of the 
overmastering compensations of age* One 
can live in the spiritual body, if he but will, 
while on earth* You will search the faces 
of Gladstone and Bismark, as they looked 
in their later years, in vain, for any traces 

108 



Whither 

of the realities of age* Though their locks 
were gray and their faces wrinkled, the 
immortal youth of the spiritual body dom- 
inated the physical tenement and shone 
from it clearly* So might it be with all of 
of us* But in order to have it so a man 
needs to realize and feel the imperial majesty 
of the immortality which God has given 
him* He needs to train his heart to love 
toward all his fellow men and to be glad in 
whatever right thing brings gladness to 
them* While giving charity* not merely 
toleration, to all men he needs to rely upon 
his own independent judgment in all ques- 
tions of right and wrong or which concern 
his spiritual welfare* So with aging years 
will he come nearer and nearer to an under- 
standing of the reason of his being, to an 
unshaken confidence in his future and to a 
realization of that peace which passeth un- 
derstanding* Clouds of doubt and fear may 
sometimes creep over him but they will pass 
and leave the sunset sky serene* Such vision 
the aging years ought to bring to all* 

The universe could not exist if it were 
not equipped with immutable laws and 
forces which govern every action of every- 
thing in it down to the minutest detail* 
Unless the final degradation of the human 
race and the ultimate failure of the scheme 
of the universe has been ordered from the 

109 



Whither 

beginning, an inconceivable and impossible 
thing, the end and ultimate must be the 
success of the plan and the constant devel- 
opment of the human ego into higher and 
higher things* It must be a plan which 
allows for many a stop and many a jolt 
and many a period of apparent retrogression 
for civilization after civilization has waxed 
and waned upon this planet, the waning 
doubtless being because at some point in the 
progress of nations intellect parted company 
with goodness and the two grew wider and 
wider apart, for plainly growth in intellect 
toward an evil eminence is not permissible 
beyond the point where reform is possible, 
under the dominion of a creator whose mo- 
tive of existence is love* 

But the finality is never in doubt* A 
writer of history who had a rare insight 
into its real meaning said at the end of a 
work upon which ne had wrought many 
years, " These pages will not have been 
written in vain if the facts they present 
impress the reader as they have impressed 
the author, with a conviction that the civ- 
ilization of Europe has not taken place 
fortuitously, but in a definite manner and 
under the control of natural law ; that the 
procession of nations does not move forward 
like a dream, without reason or order, but 
that there is a predetermined, solemn march 

no 



Whither 

in which all must join, ever moving, ever 
resistently advancing:, encountering and 
enduring an inevitable succession of events* 
♦ ♦ I have asserted the control of natural 
law in the shaping of human affairs — a 
control not inconsistent with free will ♦ ♦ ; 
that higher law limits our movements to a 
certain direction and guides them in a cer- 
tain way*" This is true* Men and nations 
have an ample margin of free will within 
the leash of which they can do works of 
good or evil, with sure recompense in kind, 
but beyond that their courses are as fixed 
as those of the stars* Although God is im- 
manent in the dust that you tread under 
foot and in the decaying leaves which carpet 
the dusky silences of trackless forests, He is 
first of all the transcendent Creator, King 
and Master of the universe* Princes and 
potentates, armies and empires are, in them- 
selves, nothing to Him* The wealth of the 
Indies He balances by a pebble on the strand ; 
He can make either with equal ease* Human 
pomp and power count for less than the 
breath of the sweet-toned winds* Every 
man who seeks to live by the Golden Rule 
and every man who tramples it under foot 
in the race for wealth or pleasure or power 
or fame, no matter under what forms he 
seeks to conceal from himself or others the 
real nature oi his acts, will reap exactly as 

ill 



Whither 

he sows and that to the uttermost atom of 
recompense* It is not, alone, a matter of the 
<wiU of God* It is a matter of eternal law* 

This is truth that would be terrible even 
unto despair were it not that the creation of 
man has its source in a fountain of infinite 
love* For each man love and law start 
their course together and run in a blended 
stream through all the eternities* God's 
love sleeplessly envelopes the worst and 
vilest of wrong doers for within him shines 
the jewel of immortal consciousness, with 
all its wonderful potencies, that he took 
from God* It is the divine will, to which all 
created things must sooner or later render 
perfect obedience, that he shall love that 
which is good, triumph over that which is 
evil, come to a knowledge of the majesty of 
the nature which God has given him and 
course through eternity on ever rising wing* 
The law demands atonement for all wrong- 
doing to the uttermost, but not all atone- 
ment is unwelcome; if a man takes a great 
burden of wilful and enlightened wrong- 
doing to the next world, there it is for him 
a midnight of misery, with every wrong 
act stripped of all disguises, known to him- 
self and to all others for just what it is, 
and burning with sharp distinctness into his 
consciousness so long as he rebels against 
punishment and atonement; but once re- 

112 



Whither 

pentancc comes in such full and sincere 
measure that he hastens to submit and 
atone, no matter at what cost, and to do 
works meet for repentance, then the stars 
creep out one by one, suffusing* the darkness 
with the morning: starligfht which finally, 
as repentance and atonement do their perfect 
work, breaks into the white light of the 
eternal day* 

Are there then no lost souls ? Only God 
can answer* We can try to imagine how 
Infinite Love would deal with the irre- 
deemably bad* Eternal torture is out of the 
question. Eternal persistence in evil is equal- 
ly out of the question* It only remainsrthat 
irredeemable badness must finally work ex- 
tinction of consciousness* But that cannot 
quench the immortal spark from God which 
was clothed upon with the consciousness* 
What more reasonable than that in due time, 
perhaps after a night of ages* when the 
morning of creation is breaking: upon a 
gathering: mass of world-mist, the quench- 
less immortal spark shall be ag*ain launched 
into matter, unhampered and untainted by 
its awful past ? Who of us knows that he 
has not just that past behind him? But 
eternity is a long: time — long: enough to pro- 
vide incarnations to lead all souls to ligfht* 



113 






Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: August 2005 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 



.'■■ 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




014 652 626 3 




